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Like many art practitioners across cultures and over generations, I work in my room. A room serves the function of essential studio space, a space where I can paint, write, read, chant, meditate or do nothing. The notion of “a room of one’s own” brought forth by the writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) in the 1920s is a c­ommon goal among many practitioners in the arts, women in particular. This continues to the present day. In this article, I aim to illustr­ate how my practice is akin to that of women in the West, Paris in particular, at the turn of the twentieth century in the longing for one's private space. The article explores the notion of private space in other, less obvious ways. I also discuss how women in a remote part of China in their own rooms, through the exclusive practice ofnüshu, a set of near-extinct and “secret” writing script, echoed the significance of having their own platform, a creative space in which they could excel. I demonstrate how, through appropriating some characters from the Chinese language with a “female” ideograph andnüshuscript, my drawing acts as a strategy, suggesting that the “edge” of culture could speak. In addition, it attempts to “practice that difference” advocated by the philosopher Luce Irigaray (b. 1930). Working and exhibiting in various spaces, I realize that a room for executing and displaying is a transitional tool. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on women writers, artists, and performers and mentions writers J.K. Rowling and Gwen John, and talks about the 2011 exhibition "A Room" at the Ox Warehouse in Macao, China. The author discusses her drawing interest and tools such as graphite on paper and fabrics as preceded in both Eastern and Western drawing traditions. She also talks about Nu¨shu culture and its significance in her creative work and writing.

Exclusively used by women over generations, nüshu, women's script, had remained a secret among women within the township of Shangjiangxu in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, China, until the mid-1950s. Writings in nüshu are found on papers, paper fans, booklets, and some are embroidered on fabrics. The use of nüshu has died and it is no longer practised. I travelled into the region three times and visited some elderly women who shared with me their experiences of nüshu in embroidering, weaving, chanting and writing. I am recapturing here some accounts of these women, who developed their own means of creative communication asserting themselves. With their modest artefacts in nüshu, the women expressed their concerns, in turn defined for themselves positive terms in the contexts they lived. The rhetoric of the writing is interwoven with individual and collective memories, fragmentary and repetitive, recalling a dying culture which once united the women in an exclusive sisterhood, at the same time delivering a genealogy of their being, which was forgotten in history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes the form of a letter, a genre prevalent among many women across cultures, and manifestly among some women in the Nüshu region. Exclusively used by women in Shangjiangxu Township, Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, China, Nüshu, women's script, is believed to have been created by women. Through generations of practice of this matriarchal script in writing letters, wedding missives, biographies and autobiographies, some women had defined positive terms for themselves in the contexts in which they lived. Addressing an elderly woman, now deceased, whom I visited three times over a span of five years, the writing covers accounts of the women's practice, interwoven with cultural discourse, mainly women's art and literary practices, and philosophy from the West. Whilst bringing forward a forgotten culture and seeking the possibility of articulating one's desires, the writing opens up a dialogue connecting women in the practice of chanting, writing and drawing, across cultures, space and time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nushu, women's script, is believed to have been created and practiced exclusively by women in the Shangjiangxu Township, Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, China for some hundred years. Through a set of unique matriarchal scripts, these women developed a tradition of storytelling, orally in chants, in embroidery, and in written form. They had produced abundant records of their stories in the form of either a biography or an autobiography, which shows a valid representation of their genealogy, a vital condition informing women's identity. I am taking the form of an autobiography, an interdisciplinary practice, as a disrupting challenge of conventions to reveal fragments of the stories of some of these women I visited in the region. With a singular ‘she’ throughout the writing, I have attempted to resist from all patriarchal definitions and appropriations: she is fluid, she is in flux, she is multiple, and she cannot be fixed. She is one and all. She is fragmentary and a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]