Janice Li

The presence of Chinese women in the discourse around London urban and cultural history is readily neglected, often assumed to be restricted to theatrical and circus performers, or wives of working labour in Limehouse; but in fact, pioneering Chinese female architects, diplomats, activists, feminist writers, and doctors had resided in London as early as the interwar period, and led active social life in the public sphere. Fashion choices of these Chinese women have not been studied in great length, giving rise to a stereotyped racial filter to mainstream perception of Chinese bodies and dresses, both in the historiography of Chinese in London as well as how Chinese were perceived in the first few decades of the twentieth century. By investigating how these women negotiated their identities through cultural cross-dressing and portrait photography in a displaced urban environment, this research utilises design history to re-examine and reconstruct the currently ambiguous existence of Chinese elite women in London during the interwar period, reclaiming their place in the urban landscape.

Visual representation of photographs cannot be taken at face value as it is often performed with various agenda to achieve both westernisation and self-orientalisation, resistance to orientalism, or self-identification. The class and ethnic background and diasporic experience of the protagonists in the photographs, and their way of cultural cross-dressing pre-migration are inquired into, deconstructing the complexity of being 'modern Chinese women' in the Nanjing decade. The three thorough case studies of Madame Wellington Koo, Lu Bi-cheng, and Phyllis Lin’s act of cultural cross-dressing will be argued as a tool of rebellion against the stereotypical perception of Chinese women in London. Through fashion and portrait photography, they continually reinvented their de-ethnicised, transnational identities. Their way of taking ownership over their bodies and their existence in a foreign metropolis not only defied the expectations at the time, but also supplied an alternative imagination of local/global cultural exchange in a momentous narrative of history.