Following the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, official ideological strictures gradually loosened in China. Cultural relations with the outside world slowly resumed, and foreign publications about modern and contemporary art, culture, and philosophy became available in the country.

In September 1979, the avant-garde Stars Art Group, which comprised of more than twenty artists, held a non-official open-air exhibition. The styles and themes of the works in this Stars Art Exhibition were a complete departure from the art in China during the Cultural Revolution. The exhibited artworks did not serve the function of political propaganda. Instead, they were products of the artists’ creative expression. Li Shuang (born 1956, Beijing) was one of the founders of the Stars Art Group. After being sent to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, Li returned to Beijing, where she participated in numerous underground art salons and became acquainted with artists and poets such as Mang Ke, Bei Dao, Yan Li, Huang Rui, and Ma Desheng. Li was an artist as well as an organiser for the Stars Art Exhibition. Following the spark that was ignited by the Stars Art Group, other female artists also became involved in similar avant-garde groups that emerged throughout the country.

This essay presents the stories of selected women artists born in the mid-1950s and early 1960s. Seeking to create a more inclusive and diverse portrayal of art history, our research team drew on archival materials, interviews, and artwork analysis to explore the important yet overlooked contributions women artists made to conceptual art following its arrival in China in the 1980s. All our subjects lived through the traumas of the Cultural Revolution. Many were sent to rural areas for work and re-education. They experienced material and cultural deprivation, with some being forced to cut short their primary education. Many of these women, however, also experienced artistic awakenings during this period. Their encounters with political propaganda, including posters, sculptures, and model operas, exposed them to different methods of artistic production. Some of these women later became part of a small minority of female students to receive a tertiary education. After graduation, many still faced slights and oversights, both intentional and otherwise, as well as other displays of society’s ubiquitous gender discrimination, including in the form of motherhood penalties.

This essay offers an in-depth discussion from three perspectives of women artists who undertook creative journeys into the realm of conceptual art in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. These women broke away from the stylised depictions of the real world that were made with traditional media (such as oil painting, ink painting, and sculpture) and engaged in diverse experiments with the formal languages of art. They had open-minded approaches to materials and techniques, and their artworks were not static and self-contained, with some requiring audience interaction. Their status as women also profoundly influenced the content and expression of their ideas.

Ever since Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, the appropriation of everyday objects has been one of the most important techniques of conceptual art. The use of these ‘readymades’ dramatically expanded the realm of artistic materials while also challenging the idea that artworks are the creations of artists.

Xiamen Dada member Liu Yiling (born 1958, Xiamen) employed readymades in her Suspended Coca-Cola Cans installation at the Xiamen Dada: Modern Art Exhibition, which opened in September 1986. Comprising more than 100 empty cans of Coca-Cola hanging at varying heights from the ceiling, the installation marked Liu’s first time employing readymades in her work. It was also the first installation made by Liu, who had previously focused on oil painting. This creative shift may have seemed sudden, but the underlying conceptual transformation did not happen overnight. Following the end of the Cultural Revolution, Liu studied the influx of texts about humanities, social sciences, as well as Chinese and foreign art history. She had also contributed to the internal academic lecture series that accompanied the Xiamen Dada: Modern Art Exhibition, laying the groundwork for the growth in the creation, development, and significance of modern art.

For her installation, Liu used soda cans that were brought back by her brother, who was a sailor. Unlike the glass bottles of Coca-Cola that were produced in Xiamen, pop-top cans were considered imported luxury products at the time. After finishing a Coca-Cola, Liu would keep the can because she was fond of the light, delicate, and pretty packaging. While preparing for the Xiamen Dada: Modern Art Exhibition in 1986, Liu turned her attention to the empty soda cans she had accumulated. Rather than treating Coca-Cola as a symbol of consumer culture or the large-scale importation of Western products into China during the country’s reform and opening up, Liu was more interested in the can’s material characteristics, such as its texture, shape, colour, and weight. By creating an installation, she was able to bring these characteristics into focus.

Liu experimented with a variety of techniques before ultimately deciding to use thread to suspend the cans in the air. Despite occupying the greatest possible amount of space, the floating cans also appear light and free from oppressive boundaries. Liu was willing to break down the traditional barrier between an artwork and the audience by allowing viewers to walk through the installation so they could bump into the cans, elicit sounds from the collisions, and interact with the work in other ways. This viewing experience, in which the audience and the artwork share a relatively equal relationship, echoes fellow Xiamen Dada member Huang Yong Ping’s ‘diverse postmodern’ philosophy, which states that ‘[art] and life fully permeate, participate, and embrace one another.’^[1] By using everyday objects from her life in her work, Liu transformed her life experience into art. It is noteworthy that Liu’s interest was first aroused by the material—the soda cans—and her idea for the Suspended Coca-Cola Cans installation only came afterwards.

In the mid-1980s, Shen Yuan (born 1959, Putian), who was also closely affiliated with Xiamen Dada, began creating installations using readymades. Shen attributes her foray into contemporary art to the four years she spent at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art), where she benefitted from the liberal atmosphere of the era, the resources in the academy’s library, and her interactions with fellow students. After graduating in 1982, Shen accepted a teaching position in Fuzhou. She eventually became a couple with Huang Yong Ping, and the two of them frequently discussed their ideas about art. The practices of the Xiamen Dada group also had an influence on Shen.

During her studies, Shen began to feel the limitations of painting. She sought ways to overcome these constraints; she experimented with changing her painting methods, and she also dabbled in collage and creative writing. Then, in 1989, she was invited to participate in the China/Avant-Garde exhibition. She used this opportunity to realise her first installation, which was titled Waterbed. She used a soldering iron and a clear plastic sheet to create a mattress that she filled with water, fish, and plants. The mattress was then placed on a small foldable bed frame that Shen had bought in Beijing. The installation was one of the earliest Chinese contemporary artworks to incorporate live animals. Shen’s shift to installation art was an intuitive move that surprised even herself. Even though she did not know exactly what installations were at the time, she felt that using readymades and mixed media allowed her to break free from pre-existing theoretical frameworks of creation. Shen admitted that the Waterbed she made in 1989 was ‘a very crude thing’ that was not as pretty and precise as later versions. Nonetheless, the work told a story about that era: the waterbed was a new and trendy product in the early years of China’s reform and opening up, and the fish imprisoned within the mattress could be seen as a metaphor for the individuals living in an oppressive political environment.

Unlike Shen and Liu, who were both associated with the ’85 New Wave art movement in China, Hu Bing (born 1957, Shanghai) moved to the United States in 1986 and made the transition from oil painting to installation while living overseas. Hu created her first installation work, Kite No. 3 (1991), while studying at the Art Students League of New York. The work was a complete departure in both concept and medium from the Modigliani-style portraits Hu made when she was in China. Kite No. 3 was an experimental work that sprang from Hu’s explorations of new artistic languages. The installation comprises multiple rectangular acrylic boards of different sizes that protrude from a wall at various angles. Trapped within the acrylic boards are drawings on specially treated paper used for printmaking. The boards cast different layers of shadows on the wall, making it seem as if two-dimensional surfaces are entering a three-dimensional space and creating a visual metaphor for the artist’s transition from painting to installation. At the time, Hu was working as an assistant to Tadaaki Kuwayama, and her work was influenced by the Minimalist pioneer’s style. She deliberately avoided a narrative approach and instead pursued a simple and restrained aesthetic. The installation is also an early example of Hu’s use of the transparent materials that she favoured in her later works.

As a recent immigrant to New York, Hu felt particularly sensitive to her new and unfamiliar surroundings. This heightened awareness led her to discover new materials for her art from her daily life. At the time, she shared a single studio in Brooklyn with a few other artists in order to save rent. In 1980s Brooklyn, it was not uncommon for parked cars to be vandalised, and the smashed windshields captured Hu’s attention. For her 1995 installation, Unfunctional, she collected broken car windshields from scrapyards and hung them from a massive network of wire hangers that she had built. Though the windshields still retained their original shapes, their once-hard material now hung pliantly like delicate fabric, forming an unexpected textural contrast. At the exhibition site, fragments of glass would sometimes fall from the windshields, creating a feeling of unease among viewers. The material exuded a sense of violence, danger, and abjection, but it also possessed a certain crystalline beauty. In this sense, it became a reflection of the artist’s life during her early years in New York.

Liu, Shen, and Hu all made the transition from two-dimensional paintings to three-dimensional installations. They drew upon everyday objects around them and consciously incorporated these readymades into their art. Their early installations also encapsulate their ideas and thinking at that stage of their careers.

While some artists embraced the appropriation of everyday objects, others remained dedicated to making things by hand and saw such practices as an indispensable part of their creations. Huang Yali (born 1954, Enshi) is an example of such an artist. Huang enrolled in the Hubei College of Fine Arts in 1975 and was assigned to the sculpture department. In 1986, after being exposed to the works and concepts of foreign modern and contemporary art through periodicals and other channels, Huang began to contemplate ways to update her own artistic language within this new context. She abandoned the realist approach of her earlier years and turned to more abstract formal experiments, as demonstrated by her Solemn series (1986). Rather than adopting avant-garde artistic techniques, such as the use of readymades, Huang drew on China’s long cultural heritage and expressed her artistic ideas with traditional media and techniques.

The Solemn series was inspired by the forms and symbols of artefacts from the ancient state of Chu, which was located in present-day Hubei and Hunan during the Eastern Zhou period from 771 BCE to 256 BCE. Many of these artefacts were unearthed during the 1980s at major archaeological sites, such as the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, leading to a wave of renewed interest in Chu culture and history. Around 1985, Huang visited almost all of the major museums and historical sites in central, western, and southern China and developed a profound interest in traditional bronzeware, stone inscriptions, and lacquerware.^[2] For the Solemn series, Huang said she ‘sought to break down and reassemble the forms found in the Chu artefacts and simplify them to an extreme while endowing them with a modern consciousness’.^[3]

The sculptures in the series vary in size and are composed of wood, plaster, and lacquer. They have mostly symmetrical structures, and their bold red and black hues create an eye-catching contrast. Red and black were important colours in Chu culture: red, which is reminiscent of fire and the sun, represented life and hope; black, which is often associated with the cold and darkness, symbolised death. In the series, a bright red sculpture of the Chinese character that means ‘concave’ (凹) has a clean-cut rectangular shape and smooth, planar surfaces. The black symbol painted in its centre calls to mind the double-antlered motif of Chu-style tomb-guarding beasts. In addition, some of the sculptures have shapes that resemble ancient bronzeware, while others are adorned with the curved organic patterns found on Chu lacquerware. Huang said she wanted viewers to walk among the sculptures as if they were traversing the realms of yin and yang or moving between the past and present. The works were made with a complex process involving multiple layers of lacquer to create an enhanced sense of temporality. Huang encouraged viewers to touch the sculptures so they could experience the beauty of the lacquer material first hand.

At a time when material options for sculptures were relatively limited, Huang ingeniously made use of traditional craft techniques and symbols from local history. By combining these elements with a modern visual language and ideas, she managed to explore the mysteries of the distant past with a solemn tone while also allowing viewers to experience something completely new.

Another artist from Hubei, Qiu Ping (born 1961, Wuhan) also utilised handcrafted products after making the transition from painting to installation. As a student in the oil painting department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Qiu experienced a shocking awakening to new forms of art from lectures given by overseas visiting professors as well as from new texts that were added to the academy’s library. She initially planned on using her graduation project to experiment with new art forms, but her ideas were rejected by her more conservative academic adviser. Feeling that her creativity and enthusiasm were being stifled, Qiu sought out the opportunity to study abroad in Germany, where she hoped to enjoy greater creative freedom.

Qiu’s shift to conceptual art happened as a consequence of her studies at the Berlin University of the Arts in 1988. When she first arrived in Germany, she continued the painting practice that she’d focused on during her undergraduate studies. However, her professor Shinkichi Tajiri suggested that she take a break from painting and encouraged her to explore Berlin’s rich cultural resources. Qiu’s visits to art museums and galleries catalysed a transformation in her creative ideas. Conceptual art was widely represented in Berlin’s lively and diverse art scene in the late 1980s, and Qiu’s creative evolution was closely related to the works she exposed herself to while she was there.

Following two years of experimentation, Qiu created her first installation, titled Chinese Door, in 1990. From afar, the large-scale artwork resembles a bright-red wooden box that consists of a set of interior and exterior doors. The exterior door opens inward, allowing spectators to enter. Like the doors of the Forbidden City in Beijing, the outer door features nine rows of nine golden nails on each side. The eighty-one nails are a reference to the imperial harem system of ancient China, which is embodied by the phrase: ‘three palaces, six courtyards, and seventy-two concubines’. Standing in the darkness within the installation, one faces the tightly shut interior door, which resembles the front entrance of a traditional Chinese house. On this door, there are two nails connected by an iron chain. Due to their protruding form, door nails are also known as ‘breast nails’. For Chinese Door, Qiu spent an entire year hand-moulding the door nails so they would resemble a woman’s breast.

According to Qiu, she often finds new creative inspiration while she’s crafting something by hand. Following Chinese Door, she made more than 100 ceramic rice bowls for her 1993 installation, 1.2 Billion Rice Bowls for China, and it’s easy to see the semi-spherical bowls as a continuation of the copper breast nails she had previously crafted. The installation resembles a gigantic abacus. The abacus beads are replaced by rice bowls, and their positions represent the number 1.2 billion, which was China’s population at the time. Handmade by the artist, the rice bowls naturally have varying forms; some are round and full, while others have chips and cracks. The work can also be tied to Chinese folk wisdom, which often uses the rice bowl as a metaphor for one’s livelihood. In this sense, Qiu cleverly drew on the symbols of the abacus and the rice bowl to express the diverse living conditions of people in a heavily populated country.

While conceptual art often breaks from tradition, the artistic practices of Huang and Qiu demonstrate their ability to combine traditional media, handicrafts, and symbols with new artistic ideas, proving once again that conceptual art cannot be easily defined by its medium. As long as an artwork can effectively convey an idea or concept, the artist can employ any material, form, or method to create it.

Without a doubt, the common denominator of all the artists in this study is their status as women. In the era in which they grew up, the slogan ‘women hold up half the sky’ resounded throughout China, and its influence continues to this day. At the time, the officially promoted image of women was that of healthy, strong labourers and revolutionaries, and calls for gender equality were still based on masculine characteristics. Although some of the interviewed artists said they did not put any special emphasis on gender in their creations, it’s easy to find profound considerations of the circumstances of women and artistic expressions of female subjectivity in many of their conceptual works.

In Chinese Door, for example, Qiu treats the door as a symbol of Chinese feudal traditions and patriarchal structures, and the breast nails represent the women who are trapped and oppressed by these systems. The physical structure, comprising a household door within the palace door, represents the feudalistic and patriarchal principle of ‘one structure for family and country’ and embodies the many obstacles on the road to liberation for Chinese women.

Chinese Door, which was first exhibited in Berlin in 1991, may have been the first time that a Chinese female artist dared to use the breast as a symbol to critique the oppression of women by feudalistic traditions and patriarchal structures. The subversive nature of Qiu’s work and her awareness of female subjectivity are especially evident since women’s breasts have been heavily eroticised by patriarchal culture. In addition to her work as an artist, Qiu also served as co-curator in 1998 for Half the Sky: Chinese Women Artists, an exhibition at the Bonn Women’s Museum in Germany. The exhibition, which focused on installations, featured the works of twenty-six Chinese female artists from around the world, marking the first formal presentation of art by Chinese women for a Western audience.

Hu also contributed an installation titled The Pregnant and the Aborted (1995) to the Half the Sky exhibition. If the breast nails of Chinese Door could be read as symbols of women’s bodies and circumstances, The Pregnant and the Aborted expresses the artist’s reflections on the uniquely female experience of childbirth. In 1980s China, sexual education was widely lacking, and strong prejudices remained against unmarried women who became pregnant. Against this backdrop, a friend of Hu had an unplanned pregnancy and was forced to undergo an abortion in a remote clinic with poor sanitary conditions. The friend faced derogatory treatment from the medical staff and suffered both physically and mentally as a result. Hu had already transitioned from painting to installation by that point and was in the process of further examining what she wished to express through her art. Her friend’s experience spurred Hu to create The Pregnant and the Aborted. The installation combines physical materials, light, space, and other elements to create a visual representation of a bodily experience that is often pushed into the shadows. With this work, Hu presents the effects that pregnancy and abortion can have on the bodies and minds of women in a specific social context.

The primary material of The Pregnant and the Aborted is latex sheeting, which resembles human skin in colour and translucence. Plastic water jugs hidden behind the latex ‘skin’ represent women’s bellies during various stages of pregnancy and abortion. Lightbulbs within the jugs bring the bellies to life, and the electrical cords that power them resemble umbilical cords. Pieces of white cotton gauze adorn the latex sheets like skirts, enhancing the artwork’s sense of personification. This installation has subsequently been exhibited in many cities around the world. The fact that The Pregnant and the Aborted has become one of Hu’s most widely shown works demonstrates the universality of the experience and thoughts that it expresses. Today, as women’s reproductive rights are once again challenged and threatened, the significance of this work is as relevant as ever.

Another intense expression of female subjectivity can be found in Dialogue (1988). This work is the first installation by Xiao Lu (born 1962, Hangzhou), who was a key figure in the shooting incident at the 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition. While still a student at the secondary school affiliated with the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Xiao was lured into an abusive relationship with a much older man, who was a revered master of Soviet Socialist Realism painting. Xiao’s hatred of her abuser and her weariness of mainstream art styles became enmeshed in her mind. For Xiao, Soviet-style painting ‘was represented by the wrong face, and it no longer inspired’ her.^[4] During her sophomore year at Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Xiao experienced a breakthrough thanks to the artist Maryn Varbanov, who had been invited from France to teach and establish an institute of wall hangings at the university. Varbanov felt that the two-dimensionality of painting was limiting Xiao’s creativity, and he encouraged her to experiment with conceptual art and to use whatever materials she liked to express her personal experiences. In her initial attempt to move from painting to mixed media, Xiao created Contemplation (1986), which combined oil painting with rubbings from stone steles.

Dialogue, one of Xiao’s graduation projects and her first true installation work, demonstrated a further expansion of the artist’s imaginative use of materials. The central components of Dialogue are two aluminium-alloy telephone booths that Xiao commissioned from the Hangzhou bureau of telecommunications. The telephone booths look almost identical to those that could be found on the streets of Hangzhou at the time. One booth has a black-and-white photograph of a man engaged on a call, while the other booth has a photo of a woman on the phone. As a student of the oil painting department, Xiao initially planned on depicting the man and woman with realistic oil paintings. But one of her graduate advisers, the artist Zheng Shengtian, suggested using photography instead to achieve the goal of realism. Xiao ultimately abandoned the use of oil painting in Dialogue, setting a pioneering precedent as a student in the oil painting department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts who used no painting techniques whatsoever for her graduation project.

Between the two phone booths in Dialogue is a red phone on a pedestal with a large mirror behind it. The phone’s receiver hangs off the hook, implying a break in communication. This image is drawn from Xiao’s personal experience: while she was a university student, she called her former abuser from a phone booth in Hangzhou to confront him about his actions, but he quickly hung up on her. Speaking about that moment in her life, Xiao said she felt ‘trapped within the phone booth’, as if she had been ‘abandoned on a desert island’.^[5] This experience of pain, confusion, hatred, and shame formed the cornerstone of Dialogue.

On 5 February 1989 at the China/Avant-Garde exhibition, Xiao fired two bullets into the mirror between the phone booths in Dialogue.^[6] The shooting shocked the world, and the exhibition was temporarily closed. Xiao’s bold act shattered the integrity of the installation’s appearance, but in doing so, she brought the work’s conceptual significance to fruition. The shooting—a dangerous and radical action—unleashed Xiao’s long-repressed outrage and denounced the unspeakable crimes perpetrated by her abuser. Through her art, she was able to avenge herself as a woman. Dialogue has, as a result, become an extension of the artist’s life experience. The narratives surrounding this artwork and the shooting incident have continued to evolve with the passing of time and have even been cleverly re-appropriated by patriarchal society, reflecting the unending difficulties that stymie women’s self-expression.^[7]

The women artists presented in this essay engaged in pioneering conceptual art experiments in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Most of them transitioned from painting to installation, but they used vastly different materials and methods, each with their own distinct merits. Everyday objects (such as soda cans, car windshields, and telephone booths), flora and fauna, traditional handicrafts (including lacquerware and ceramics), photography, and performances can all be found in these women’s creative work. Moreover, many of these artists considered the interactive relationships their works would have with viewers and the exhibition spaces. They had the courage to break away from traditional and monolithic viewing experiences, either by inviting spectators to pass into their artworks or by actively destroying a perfect mirror image, thereby using their actions to express their points of view.

Some of the works by these artists expressed ideas that were unrelated to gender, while other pieces contained fresh and distinctively female perspectives. Although they were not deeply versed in feminist theory, the artists drew on their individual life experiences as starting points to diverge from patriarchal frameworks so they could form their own creative practices and critiques. These were uncommon and precious creative acts in the social context of that time period. It is worth noting that these artworks did not feature thread, cloth, or other materials that were subsequently associated with ‘feminine qualities’. As such, we can see a clear distinction between these works and the ‘women’s approach’ to art-making that emerged from the mid-1990s onwards.

Amid the many artistic revolutions and advancements that happened in the 1980s, it is a pity that the contributions of these Chinese female artists were mostly overshadowed by other developments. Issues and perspectives related to gender were easily obscured by the grand narratives of the avant-garde art movement. By the time Chinese contemporary art and Chinese women’s art began to receive greater domestic and international attention as a result of the political and economic developments of the 1990s (namely, China’s opening up and reform, globalisation, urbanisation, and the rise of consumerism), many of these women artists had already become part of a diaspora and were rebuilding their lives in foreign lands and cultures as artists, wives, and mothers.

Held in Beijing in 1995, the ^[8]United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women marked a high point in the advancement of feminism in China in the mid-1990s and contributed to the growing recognition of women’s art as a category.^[9] The event’s massive influence reverberated throughout the art world, and in the 1990s, many exhibitions centred on Chinese female artists were held in China and abroad, including Women’s Approach to Contemporary Chinese Art at the Beijing Art Museum in 1995; a 1995 exhibition of new works by Li Xiuqin, Chen Yanyin, and Jiang Jie at the Central Academy of Fine Arts; Century. Woman in 1998; and the Beijing New Century International Women’s Art Exhibition in 2001. Many of the Chinese women artists who are well known today first burst into the limelight during this period. Compared to the women artists who preceded them, their works more clearly expressed the female perspective and generously presented the feminine characteristics that were suppressed during the ‘half the sky’ era. Examples of such artists include Yin Xiuzhen (born 1963, Beijing), who used her own old clothing to create her installation Dress Box (1995) as well as her Portable Cities series, and Lin Tianmiao (born 1961, Taiyuan), who created the complicated handcrafted multimedia installation Proliferation of Thread Winding (1995) and wove her 1998 work, Braiding, out of large quantities of thread.

Art critic Liao Wen keenly observed this phenomenon and posited the concept of ‘women’s approach to contemporary Chinese art’, which includes a consciousness of life and physical experiences; the intuitive selection of fibres and other ‘sensitive, subtle, and stimulating’ soft materials; methods that often include fine, repetitive handwork; and the expression of sensory or irrational experiences.^[10] Today, this formulation seems to exhibit the limitations of gender essentialism and falls into the trap of male-female gender binarism. But it also vividly captures the trends of the mid-1990s, when women artists rebelled against the Hua Mulan-esque desexualisation that characterised the previous era.

By this point, we have observed how the theories of conceptual art as well as various works and ideas of Western modern and contemporary art spread through China in the mid-1980s, exerting a potent influence on the artists who were active in the ’85 New Wave movement. In particular, artists were liberated from their reliance on painting, sculpture, and other traditional media, and they engaged in creative experiments with all kinds of objects found in their environments. Many women artists fervently explored alternative media and transitioned from painting to installation. This shift allowed them to more deeply express their own perspectives rather than simply creating realistic, visually pleasing images with traditional techniques taught in academic institutions. In their works, these artists convey their observations and thoughts of their identities as women. The works do not possess an obvious feminine quality and are not rooted in feminist theories. Rather, they express an awakening of subjectivity experienced by a generation of women artists who grew up in an era defined by the ‘women hold up half the sky’ slogan. These works can be seen as important and unique artistic practices in the fountainhead phase of Chinese conceptual art—they are an undercurrent in Chinese contemporary art that is worthy of retracing.