Lesbian imagery in Chinese

Japanese

and Korean art has moved from coded

unnamed intimacy in premodern painting and print culture to explicit contemporary representation

yet encyclopedic museum collections still register almost none of this shift. In this study

I integrate the content analysis of two large museum collection databases

the Penn Museum (430

811 records) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (448

203 records)

with the secondary art-historical texts into an analysis of the representation or absence of female same-sex imagery among the institutional collections of Chinese

Japanese and Korean (CJK) artists. Filtering both of these datasets to CJK-culture and figure/pictorial object types produced a list of 12

003 records; only 326 of these (2.7%) included title or description language that reflected a "lesbian" theme

intimacy

or companionship

and only 6.7% of all the Met's period-dated CJK figural works appeared in the modern-to-contemporary period

in which the terms would have been most common. When considered in conjunction with existing research into premodern "sworn sisterhood" writing

Edo-period shunga

takarazuka performance culture and post-Mao lesbian discourse

the invisibility found in the written record – and perhaps equally in popular culture – would seem to be paralleled by another invisibility in museum collecting and cataloguing practice. The authors provide a convincing argument that more visibility in culture has not yet been achieved in terms of institutional visibility and that instancing-level metadata reform is a prerequisite for future work towards the recovery of art history.