Ethnic minority women in contemporary Chinese comics: design, role and identity

Ethnic diversity has become an important part of Chinese culture. Since the finishing of the ethnic minority classification project, artworks representing minority people have appeared in many different forms. Among the studies of ethnic minority representation, hardly has any discussed minority women in comics. This study will investigate the depiction of female ethnic minority characters in Chinese comics. I have chosen two comics that are representative for two different categories. The first work is Ling-Long, an original story that uses southern ethnic minority culture as context, which falls under the ‘ethnic minority themed original stories’ category. The second one is Gada Meilin, an adaptation of a famous Mongolian folktale, which falls under the ‘adaptation of existing stories’ category. The main female characters will be analysed from two aspects: the visual design and the role they play in the story. The former aspect will investigate their appearance, dress, facial expressions and body languages, while the latter will investigate their occupation, position and action in the story. After the analysis, I will discuss my thoughts from the perspective of an art practitioner and suggest some of my own possible ways of improving the character designs.