Painting Lesbian Worlds in Portraiture: Lenore Chinn, Asian American Lesbian Visibility and (In)Scrutability

Abstract

This art history thesis examines three portraits by San Francisco-based Chinese American lesbian artist Lenore Chinn: Déjà Vu (1986), Bing (2001), and Before the Wedding (2000). With these three paintings, I demonstrate that Chinn's work departs from photographic source material and instead operates within the postmodern tradition of figurative painting. In these acrylic works, Chinn paints large-scale, monumental portraits of lesbians of color, including a self-portrait and depictions of fellow lesbian artists and friends. Chinn employs figuration while destabilizing realism through disruptions of logical pictorial space and references to art historical portraiture, constructing visual frameworks for her subjects to inhabit, thereby problematizing the genre of portraiture. The space in which Chinn paints lesbians of color is termed the "lesbian imaginary," a postmodernist alteration of realism that enables these subjects to occupy the traditionally white, cis-male-centered genre of portraiture, often associated with power and authority. Chinn utilizes postmodern strategies of appropriation and allegory, reusing and recontextualizing existing images so that the visual language of portrait painting remains present but no longer serves as a neutral ground for representation. Her paintings chart a network of lesbian artists of color in the Bay Area during the AIDS era and function as an archival practice, documenting cross-racial relationships, artistic lineages, and underrepresented forms of lesbian representation within dominant art historical narratives. This thesis argues that Chinn's work extends postmodernism by illustrating how strategies such as pastiche, appropriation, and allegory generate new configurations of queer portraiture.