Nüshu and the Quiet Transmission of Memory

Among the world’s hidden languages, few resonate as subtly yet profoundly as Nüshu, a script developed and practiced solely by women in Jiangyong, Hunan (fig.1). Long excluded from official histories and state archives, Nüshu operated as a discreet and intimate form of communication, interlacing written text, oral performance, textile craft and bodily gesture. Emerging within a social landscape where Confucian codes sharply circumscribed women’s access to formal literacy, it became a vehicle for the creation of a parallel archive of emotion and lived experience, one built from ‘sisterhood letters, wedding missives, worship verses, biographical laments, folk stories, and other narratives in verse’ exchanged between women during pivotal life events such as marriage and mourning.1

Embroidered on textiles or clothing (fig.2), inscribed on fans (fig.3), sung or chanted, Nüshu historically operated across sensory domains, challenging modern distinctions between artefact, ritual practice and archive. These works circulated within women’s networks, passing between relatives and friends. Their modest scale and fragile materials place them within what might be described as a ‘minor key’ of cultural transmission: practices sustained through intimacy rather than monumentality.

Nüshu therefore raises broader questions about how aesthetic expression is preserved and interpreted when it develops outside established frameworks of recognition. Where historical and ethnographic accounts risk fixing Nüshu as an object of either loss or recovery, artistic enquiry opens it up as a living set of questions about what counts as transmission, who inherits cultural memory and how such marginal or intimate practices continue to generate meaning beyond the structures that once overlooked them. Approaching Nüshu through contemporary art in China and beyond brings the script’s challenge to dominant paradigms of authorship and permanence into focus.

Contemporary Chinese artists have engaged Nüshu with critical reflection. Research by the writer and curator Luise Guest documents how the artists Ma Yanling (born 1966) and Tao Aimin (born 1974) have recontextualised Nüshu by linking the script’s survival to feminist concerns with recovery and reparative memory.2 The poet and artist JinJin Xu (born 1985) has extended this engagement, using Nüshu as a framework for collective testimony. Although Nüshu arose in the specific cultural landscape of Jiangyong County, its resonance extends across geographic and cultural borders. Cecilia Vicuña’s (born 1948) reactivation of the Andean quipu, Mona Hatoum’s (born 1952) engagement with Arabic script, Shirin Neshat’s (born 1957) meditations on Persian calligraphy, Zarina’s (1937–2020) abstractions of Urdu text and Marion Borgelt’s (born 1954) installations, all explore coded and gendered inscription.3

In southern China’s cultural imagination, Nüshu carried no official weight; its traces did not survive in libraries or institutions but in domestic objects. The anthropologist Fei-wen Liu emphasises the script’s affective role shaped by kinship, longing and loss, observing that Nüshu became a space where women’s inner lives could meet and blend together.4 This merging helped ease the pain of feeling unlucky or cursed, because it blurred the boundaries between individual women and wove their separate experiences of suffering into a shared emotional world.

This article takes Nüshu as a paradigm of transgenerational, embodied knowledge. It traces the script’s emergence, forms and social functions, examines the processes and politics of its preservation and rematriation, and situates it within a broader field of transnational feminist artistic and theoretical practice. Examined through the lenses of art history, feminist theory, ethnography and cultural studies, Nüshu invites us to rethink what constitutes aesthetic practice, and to attend to the fragile yet enduring forms of care through which cultural memory is transmitted across time.

The historical and cultural context of Nüshu

Nüshu emerged in late imperial China, in Jiangyong County, Hunan, a region shaped by Confucian morality, patriarchal kinship systems and local ritual practice. While its origins remain debated, most scholars place the script’s development between the late Ming (1550–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) dynasties, when literate men dominated public life and women’s access to education was limited. As the sinologist Dorothy Ko has shown, the Confucian doctrine of separate spheres relegated women to the domestic realm, where ‘reading and writing were deemed, at least in theory, an exclusively male privilege’.5 Women in Jiangyong were excluded from the classical education that underpinned literacy in Chinese characters. Nüshu emerged as a hidden yet resilient counter-archive, crafted by, in the words of the sinologist Wilt L. Idema, ‘women speaking their own minds and in their own words, unmediated by modern intellectuals, whether native party cadres or foreign anthropologists’.6

The script’s visual form is distinctive: ‘formed in a rhomboid shape characterized by oblique lines and arcs, quite different from the square form of Chinese graphs’, bearing an almost calligraphic delicacy (fig.4).7 Nüshu was used to compose narrative ballads, autobiographical laments and ritual texts for weddings and funerals. It was also used for letters between jiebai zimei (sworn sisters) – women who formed close-knit, often formally recognised bonds outside of their families. Research by the historian Anne E. McLaren reveals that Nüshu functioned not merely as written script but as voiced grief and ritualised emotion embedded in women’s life-cycle ceremonies.8 Bridal songs – performed before and after marriage – were structured as deeply personal acts of mourning learned through observation. They variably expressed sorrow at leaving home to enter their husband’s household or longing for a sworn sister.9

These oral traditions intertwined with material practices. A sanzhaoshu or third-day missive, a cloth-bound book given to a bride by her mother three days after her wedding, was both object and sound archive, carrying the gestures and emotions of its makers (fig.5). Within these gendered networks women created alternative forms of belonging. As Liu shows, Nüshu allowed rural women to forge social ties beyond kinship, sharing self-reflective commentaries on society and expressing their frustration at circumstances they had to accept.10 Meaning arose through shared vocalisation and embodied presence – each lament sustained by a chorus of listening women. Nüshu was less a fixed code than a technology of relation, suturing lives that had been fragmented by marriage, migration and patriarchal constraint.

It is also crucial to read Nüshu within the broader currents of late imperial and modern Chinese history: the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), the Qing collapse (1839–1912), the Republican revolution (1911–2), the Japanese occupation (1931–45), civil war (1927–49) and the founding of the People’s Republic (1949). Land reforms and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) targeted rural religious and cultural practices, leading to suppression and dispersal of Nüshu practitioners. As Liu notes, many materials relating to Nüshu were destroyed during the turmoil of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and the Cultural Revolution, and ‘many were burned or buried following the deaths of their owners’.11 By the late twentieth century, only a few elderly women retained active knowledge of the script. Yet Nüshu is more than a story of loss. Oral histories and everyday practices preserved memory and resistance beyond official narratives. Even amid political transformation, women’s songs, stories, rituals and crafts sustained alternative forms of sociality and meaning.

From an art historical perspective, the material forms of Nüshu offer a profound challenge to dominant paradigms of value, authorship and permanence. As the art historian Griselda Pollock argues, modern art history has been structured around exclusions of the feminine, the ephemeral, the minor and the collective.12 Nüshu’s delicate materials, collaborative production and circulation within women’s spaces demand a rethinking of what counts as art and what constitutes historical evidence. Today Nüshu has become the focus of local heritage projects, scholarly research and international exhibitions.13 Yet its entry into global circuits raises difficult questions. How can its historical specificity be honoured without romanticising feminine resilience? How can feminist art history engage with the script without flattening complexity or appropriating meaning?

Nüshu as matrilineal transmission

Nüshu’s survival was sustained through the intimate, embodied transmission of its practitioners. The script passed from mothers to daughters, sisters-in-law and sworn sisters, and endured through pedagogies of care, ritual and emotion. Elderly women taught younger generations not only how to form the characters but when and why to write – how to compose a lament on parting, how to encode grief into verse; how to remember and be remembered. The concept of matrilineal transmission is not merely descriptive; it intervenes in how art history constructs narratives of value and inheritance. Traditional models centre on patrilineal lineages – master-apprentice relationships, studio traditions, dynastic successions, avant-garde movements – all assuming visibility and institutional validation. To speak of matrilineal transmission is to affirm the historical and aesthetic significance of knowledge that passes between women, often in private or marginal spaces, through practices that leave few archival traces.

Feminist scholarship on gender, materiality and transmission provides theoretical tools through which Nüshu’s significance can be fully assessed. As Pollock has argued, practices ‘identified with the domestic, the decorative, the utilitarian, the dexterous – that is with what patriarchal logic negatively characterises as quintessentially “feminine” – are systematically downgraded, confirming rather than challenging the canonical status of masculine cultural production’.14 Art history must account for these alternative circuits: teaching through gesture and repetition rather than formal instruction; objects circulating as gifts rather than commodities; creativity embedded in daily life rather than isolated as ‘Art’ with a capital ‘A’. Instead of adding women to existing narratives, this demands a reconsideration of how to organise knowledge and how to determine what – and who – is remembered.

The embodied nature of Nüshu’s transmission challenges conventional epistemologies. The feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz argues that bodies are active sites where cultural meanings are written and transformed, and her theory of corporeal inscription offers a crucial lens. Writing Nüshu was learned through movement as the body became both text and archive: knowledge stored not only in the mind but in gesture and tactile memory. The philosopher Judith Butler’s account of performativity illuminates how repetition is never mere replication but the space in which norms are sustained and contested, where identity forms through reiterated acts that also permit variation and resistance. Butler notes that 'performativity is thus not a singular “act”, for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition’.15 Each time a woman composed a text in Nüshu, she performed a culturally scripted role yet infused it with personal inflection. The formulaic structure provided not constraint but a framework for navigating convention and creativity, collective tradition and individual voice.

The material records of Nüshu were integral to its transmission. The cultural anthropologist Annette Weiner’s concept of inalienable possessions – objects whose worth is inseparable from the relationships and histories they carry – clarifies how Nüshu scripts gain value not through exchange but through their entrenchment in social ties, embodying history, identity and connection.16 The documents are paradoxical – given yet retained, circulating yet anchored to specific people and moments. Similarly, McLaren’s research on ritual laments confirms the resilience of these oral-textual forms as women adapted performance traditions to altered circumstances. What endured was less a corpus of texts than a sensibility, an ethical orientation toward remembrance and relational care continually renewed across generations.

Rematriation and re-remembering Nüshu

Often described as the last proficient Nüshu writer, Yang Huanyi (1909–2004) was central to the preservation of the script. By sharing her knowledge with researchers in the 1990s and 2000s she was an active translator across temporal and cultural divides. The survival of Nüshu into the present is double-edged. On one hand, it has been documented, preserved and actively promoted from the late twentieth century onwards, particularly through the work of such scholars as the linguist Zhao Liming, one of the leading researchers responsible for documenting Nüshu manuscripts and recording the knowledge of the last generation of women who used the script.17 On the other hand, these efforts risk transforming a once local and relational practice into a cultural spectacle or commodified brand. The challenge of rematriation – the feminist reclamation of ancestral and gendered knowledge – lies in navigating this tension. How can a practice be recovered without fixing it as a relic? How can its histories be respected without being reduced to aestheticised folklore?

The establishment of the Jiangyong Nüshu Ecological Museum in the early 2000s marked a watershed moment (fig.6). Built as a venue for preserving and exhibiting Nüshu culture on Puwei Island, home to many historical Nüshu authors, the museum was constructed in the traditional style of Ming and Qing-era houses in southern Hunan and covers an area of 2,500 square metres. Located near the home of Yang Huanyi, the museum has become a site of pilgrimage. The collection spans original documents, calligraphy, embroidery, crafts and academic research materials, presented through objects, images, audio and video. The museum also runs calligraphy and embroidery classes, and hosts an annual festival of Nüshu poetry and song (fig.7).18

Yet its success has provoked critical questions. The museum displays extract Nüshu from the script‘s social context, presenting it as decorative or an exotic artefact severed from its networks of kinship and emotional exchange. As Liu notes ‘an entire exhibition room in the Nüshu museum is designated for showcasing new calligraphic Nüshu works, but not a single piece of the traditional Nüshu handwriting is displayed there’.19 Further, the commercialisation of Nüshu through souvenirs, branded merchandise and performance for tourists raises ethical concerns about appropriation and exploitation.

Despite these tensions, the revival of the script has opened spaces for cultural regeneration and artistic experimentation. In Jiangyong, local women’s groups and cultural associations organise workshops, performances and festivals that bring together elder tradition-bearers and younger generations. The Nüshu Museum is a central hub for this work, running free summer training that cover not only reading and writing Nüshu but also traditional songs, stories, folk customs and needlework. By 2019 these courses had trained nearly four hundred students from across China, who then carried the tradition back to their own communities. Beyond the museum, private academies has extended this reach further. He Jinghua, a Jiangyong native and Nüshu transmitter runs the Jinghua Women’s Script Academy from her home since 2000, training over four hundred women and receiving more than two hundred researchers, students and practitioners (fig.8).20 These initiatives are more than nostalgic, adapting Nüshu to contemporary contexts by combining traditional forms with modern media, technology and artistic practice.

Nüshu and contemporary art practice in China

Ma Yanling, a Beijing-based painter, photographer and performance artist, fuses Chinese traditions with a Pop-inspired Western sensibility to explore topics of memory, loss and feminine embodiment. Luise Guest argues that Ma’s work does not treat Nüshu as an exotic ornament or nostalgic folk tradition, but as a living resource for articulating contemporary female experience. Her painting technique grew directly from years of studying Nüshu characters, which the artist has described as a ‘Morse Code used only by women’.21 Ma covers her portraits of women with fine calligraphic strokes derived from the script, creating layered surfaces that collapse the past and present, visibility and obscurity (fig.9).

This logic of concealment and erasure runs through her performances, which often include her daughter, Bingmi Wang.22 In one of these works Ma and her daughter wrote Nüshu on each other’s skin and then wiped it away, enacting the script’s own historical fate. As Ma explains, ‘you wipe away the language and then you wipe away the possibility to inherit this language’.23 In Women’s Book 2013 Ma wrote Nüshu script in red ink directly onto her daughter’s white clothing before cutting it from her body strip by strip. The artist described the work as capturing the bond between mother and daughter, and the private language through which women understand and communicate their own world.24 This performance recalls third-day missives mothers made for daughters leaving home after marriage, knowing the daughter would likely never return. Guest draws a direct parallel between Ma’s performances and these lament traditions, arguing that both function as what she calls ‘a form of material rhetoric’ that carves out a discursive space for women to speak the truths of their lives, transforming sorrow and anger into acts of catharsis and collective memory.25

The artist Tao Aimin likewise works directly with Nüshu as a feminist strategy. Born in Hunan province, she grew up close to Jiangyong. In 2007 the artist returned home to learn Nüshu from an elderly master, spending one year receiving its songs, letters and history from one of its last living practitioners.26 The encounter was decisive for Tao, who explains that she was drawn to Nüshu because it ‘belongs to women’– she wanted ‘to extract the language into a cultural symbol for women, to elevate it’.27 For her installation The Secret Language of Women 2008 (fig.10) the artist created bound volumes of rubbings of women’s washboards – worn wooden boards that she collected from rural areas across China – and inscribed them with Nüshu calligraphy, reproducing the laments chanted by brides leaving their natal villages (figs.11 and 12).

The form of the work carries historical weight. Drawing from the third-day missives, Tao’s books reanimate the tradition of concealed speech. Guest has proposed that when combined with Nüshu, the artist’s washboards ‘can be read as a memorial to women who were expected to be silent, scrubbing clothes in cold water with raw hands’.28 In the 2010s Tao continued to embed Nüshu-like, slanting marks into abstracted ink (fig.13), retaining a tension between legibility and concealment, between the wish to speak and the awareness that women’s speech is often inaudible. Here Nüshu is both historical source and authorising lineage, allowing Tao to insert herself into a matrilineal chain of Chinese women’s making, which bypasses the masculine literary tradition.

The artist and poet JinJin Xu has engaged Nüshu in a work that emerged from her travels across the world to ‘record the secrets and testimonies of dislocated mothers’.29 Her installation What Would You Say If You Could? #8: Against This Earth, We Knock 2024 (fig.14) uses the script not as a visual or calligraphic reference but as a structural framework for collective testimony. Over eight years Xu collected the testimonies of sixty-four women, translating their secrets into chains of Nüshu characters moulded from resin and ashes collected from fires in Jiangyong. In the installation each chain hangs suspended above a vessel and is designed to destroy itself over the course of the exhibition – enacting, in material form, the tradition of erasure that defined Nüshu’s historical survival (fig.15). Where Tao recovers and preserves the script as an authorising lineage, Xu stages its disappearance as a living condition, returning Nüshu to the logic of secrecy and self-destruction from which it came.

The rematriation of Nüshu raises questions about the politics of heritage and cultural ownership. Who has the right to speak for a community, a language or a tradition? How can institutions – whether museums, universities or cultural foundations – support local practices without displacing or appropriating them? As the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas has argued, restitution is never only about objects; it is about the conditions of dialogue and reciprocity that make cultural exchange meaningful.30 The future of Nüshu will depend as much on cultivating those relations, and on creating spaces where its gestures and affects can circulate, as it will on further documentation.

Transnational feminist perspectives

The global visibility of Nüshu in recent decades has catalysed conversations within transnational feminist discourse, particularly around the recovery of marginalised knowledge, the politics of translation and the ethics of cultural comparison. Although the artists discussed in this section do not reference Nüshu directly, their practices converge around shared concerns: the visuality of language, gendered inscription and the interplay of personal memory and collective history. Fundamentally, they share an understanding that writing is never merely instrumental but always entangled with body, place and relation – a recognition central to Nüshu’s matrilineal transmission.

The work of Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña engages with the quipu – a knot-based system of record-keeping used by the Inca and other Andean cultures – to reframe suppressed Indigenous knowledge as living, relational practices. Historically, quipus were dismissed by European colonisers as primitive or unintelligible. Vicuña’s site-responsive installations reanimate the quipu as an ecological and political form, mobilising it against regimes of extraction, violence and erasure. The resonance of Nüshu with Vicuña’s quipu is conceptual rather than formal: both arise from contexts of colonial and patriarchal suppression, operate through non-alphabetic systems that encode knowledge in material form and have been reclaimed as resources for present feminist and decolonial memory work. Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread, Athens) 2017, links menstruation, women’s knowledge and Indigenous record-keeping, showing how bodily rhythms and material practice intertwine in the transmission of cultural memory (fig.16, Tate T15921). Both Vicuña and Nüshu practitioners refuse the Western binary between text and object, insisting on knowledge where meaning is inseparable from material, gesture and ritual.

Feminist artists working with calligraphy and textile also offer resonant connections. Mona Hatoum’s video Measures of Distance 1988 consists of several layers: her mother’s letters, written in Arabic, drift across the screen as Hatoum reads them aloud in English, while behind the text, images of her mother’s naked body, taken by the artist during a visit to Lebanon, are visible (fig.17, Tate T07538). Recorded conversations between the two women run beneath this – candid exchanges about desire, the body and Hatoum’s father’s discomfort with the project. The Arabic script moves across the mother’s body like a veil, simultaneously obscuring and disclosing the woman beneath it, marking her not as passive or fixed but as a thinking, feeling subject.

Hatoum has described the work as holding closeness and distance in the same frame at once: every image speaks of literal proximity and implied separation, the intimacy of the relationship set against the rupture of exile and war.31 Born in Beirut to Palestinian parents, Hatoum was stranded in London when the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975 and has remained there in permanent exile. The film captures intimacy and distance of exile, demonstrating the emotional charge of writing, even beyond comprehension. Like Nüshu letters exchanged between separated women, Hatoum’s text sustains connection across geographical rupture. The script overlaying her mother’s body functions as language woven into flesh, recalling Nüshu characters inscribed on cloth and worn against the skin.

Shirin Neshat’s Women of Allah 1993–7 overlays Persian poetry on photographic portraits of veiled women, transforming the body into a scripted surface (fig.18).32 The calligraphy covers faces and hands, the body becoming a surface that resists legibility. The series draws on the visual language of revolutionary Iran, where armed women became icons of militant nationalism. For non-Persian viewers the script may read as pure form or ornament, but for Persian readers it hijacks that propaganda imagery, rewriting its terms. The result sits outside both victimhood and defiance: the women are neither passive objects of ideology nor simply its opponents, but figures who occupy the imagery on their own terms. This play between visibility and opacity mirrors Nüshu’s secrecy as a language legible only to women. Both use script as expression and protection, marking presence while preserving refusal.

Zarina, an Indian-born artist who lived in exile, used Urdu calligraphy, printmaking and architectural motifs to map displacement.33 Works such as Home is a Foreign Place 1999 embed Urdu phrases into abstractions, evoking a diasporic condition in which language becomes both an anchor and a reminder of loss (fig.19). The artist’s mother tongue, Urdu, becomes the script of a homeland that partition (1947) made unreachable, a language associated in the Indian context with Muslim identity and therefore with national belonging that was simultaneously claimed and contested. For non-Urdu readers Zarina’s phrases dissolve into line and texture; for those who can read them, they name rooms, thresholds, coordinates of a life elsewhere. This split legibility is not simply loss. It also becomes a form of preservation, holding a private world intact inside a public object. Like Nüshu, the Urdu script in Zarina’s work carries cultural identity and an affective history, materialising belonging even as it marks the distance from home.

Marion Borgelt’s installation A Cryptologist’s Memoir 2004–7 offers an overt engagement with Nüshu, rooted in translation and cross-cultural encounter (fig.20). After discovering Nüshu through ethnographic texts, Borgelt was drawn to its visual elegance and history.34 The Australian artist’s resulting installation combines paintings, silk panels inscribed with Nüshu-inspired marks, video and sound, creating an immersive evocation of an undecipherable script. Borgelt does not claim authentic lineage; rather, she stages the ethical questions involved in approaching the forms of another culture, what it means for a non-Chinese artist to engage with Nüshu.

Beyond contemporary art, Lisa See’s novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), which narrates the lifelong bond between two sworn sisters who communicate through Nüshu, brought the script to global attention.35 The book’s commercial success led to a film adaptation in 2011 and inspired other novels, documentaries and cultural productions exploring Nüshu. While such popularisations risk romanticising the script and reducing it to a sentimental emblem of feminine friendship, they have also generated pathways for broader engagement, prompting questions about women’s literacy, gendered writing systems and alternative modes of cultural transmission.

Documentaries such as Nu Shu: A Hidden Language of Women in China (1999) and The Women’s Script (2016) have provided ethnographic documentation of surviving practitioners, preserving oral histories and demonstrating Nüshu’s performative dimensions. These popular forms increase access to knowledge about Nüshu and shape how it is understood, often emphasising its ‘secret’ status in ways that can flatten its complexities. The challenge, as with museum displays and heritage tourism, lies in maintaining critical attention to context, power and representation while acknowledging that popular engagement is itself a form of cultural transmission – one that operates through different circuits than academic scholarship or artistic practice.

Theoretically, Nüshu’s afterlife resonates with longstanding debates that exist within transnational feminism. The literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has warned against the sentimentalisation or appropriation of marginalised voices without attending to asymmetries of power and representation.36 The challenge is not simply to recover suppressed speech but to interrogate the discursive and institutional conditions under which forms of speech are heard, silenced or transformed. Conversely, the scholar Silvia Federici foregrounds the urgency of reclaiming women’s collective knowledges as resources for struggle. In Federici’s view, recovery is not an antiquarian project but a process of reactivating the ‘cultural symbols that give meaning to our life and nourish our struggles’.37 In this context Nüshu becomes legible not only as historical curiosity but as a catalyst for rethinking feminist solidarity, relationality and world-building across borders.

Yet transnational engagement with Nüshu also demands critical caution. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s critique of feminist universalism – the tendency to subsume diverse local struggles into a homogenised global sisterhood – is particularly relevant.38 Mohanty argues that comparative feminist work must begin from the specificity of local histories, economies and social relations, resisting the flattening of difference into sameness. In the case of Nüshu, this means attending to its roots in southwestern China’s rural, classed and ethnolinguistic contexts, while holding space for cross-cultural resonances that do not erase difference.

Finally, the transnational circulation of Nüshu points to the need for new methodological imaginaries. Pollock’s concept of the ‘virtual feminist museum’ offers one such model: a dispersed, non-hierarchical archive of artistic practices and histories, connected by their capacity to articulate and disrupt gendered, racialised and colonial regimes of visibility.39 Pollock argues that feminist art history requires more than the additive inclusion of women artists into existing narratives; it demands a fundamental rethinking of how we organise knowledge, establish value and construct art history. Her virtual feminist museum is a conceptual framework that provides a way of reading across temporal and spatial distances to illuminate connections, resonances and shared political stakes that conventional art history obscures.

Bringing Nüshu into this frame alongside such artists as Vicuña, Hatoum, Neshat, Zarina and Borgelt is not an act of assimilation or of claiming false equivalences. Pollock’s virtual museum allows for the coexistence of drastically different practices – Andean quipus and Chinese Nüshu, Persian calligraphy and Indo-Aryan Urdu, performance and textiles – not because they share form, but because they each challenge art history’s privileging of monumentality, permanence and Western modernist paradigms.

In recent years contemporary art has moved towards interdisciplinarity, collapsing boundaries between media and embracing hybrid forms. The interweaving of text and visual form cannot be said to be specific to women artists and matrilineal transmission. Yet the ways such artists as Ma, Tao, Vicuña, Hatoum and Neshat engage with script differ conceptually from text-based practices by male artists or those working outside feminist frameworks. They do not treat writing as content; rather, they foreground script as embodied, gendered and historically situated. Their work insists that certain writing systems carry specific histories of exclusion, resistance and reclamation that cannot be separated from questions of who has had access to literacy; whose languages have been suppressed; and how women have created alternative circuits of meaning-making. They claim genealogies with historical women’s practices – Nüshu, quipus, ritual laments – as a way of grounding contemporary work in longer histories of women’s creativity. This is matrilineal transmission in its expanded sense: not biological inheritance, but chosen affiliation, critical inheritance and reparative genealogy-making across time and space.

Towards an unfinished archive

Nüshu challenges the terms by which we define art and the archive. Neither fully text nor fully image, neither fixed tradition nor open invention, it slips across disciplinary and institutional categories, demanding a more expansive and supple framework of analysis. To approach Nüshu is to enter a world of minor gestures and fragile traces. It is to confront a form of cultural transmission that unfolds not through monumental permanence but through ephemerality, improvisation and care. Art historians and feminist theorists have long argued for the importance of attending to the minor, ephemeral and overlooked. Nüshu belongs to an expanded archive –a living practice that continues to reverberate across artistic, scholarly and political fields.

The case of Nüshu underscores the ambivalent nature of recovery and preservation. As Ruth B. Phillips and Nicholas Thomas have both argued, the politics of cultural heritage cannot be separated from questions of power and cross-cultural mediation.40 To recover Nüshu does not only mean saving a fading script, but grappling with the meanings, relations and conditions that once sustained it and to ask whether, and how, those conditions can be regenerated or reimagined today. Rematriation, in this sense, is not a matter of nostalgic return but of reparative invention: a creative, ethical project that navigates between loss and possibility.

The concept of matrilineal transmission – developed through the work of Butler, Grosz and Weiner and illuminated by McLaren’s research on ritual performance – offers a framework for understanding forms of cultural exchange that operate outside institutional validation, which privilege the collective over the singular and survive through embodied practice rather than archival documentation. Nüshu’s rematriation, examined through the work of contemporary Chinese artists and its transnational resonances, reveals how historical practices can be reactivated not as static traditions but as living resources for feminist reimagining. What emerges is a constellation of practices that have left only partial traces – an unfinished archive of feminine creativity and resilience that challenges art history to expand its methodologies and its canons of what aesthetic practice can be.

Importantly, Nüshu’s story belongs neither solely to China nor to the past. It speaks to shared concerns that traverse cultures and epochs: the fragility of memory, the politics of visibility, the ethics of inheritance and the forms of life that survive in the margins. Rosi Braidotti’s work on nomadic ethics and affirmative politics offers a lens for understanding what is at stake in this project of recovery and reimagining. Braidotti argues against modes of thought trapped in melancholia or nostalgic longing for lost wholeness; instead, she advocates for affirmative practices that honour loss while generating new possibilities, mourning what has been destroyed while cultivating conditions for different futures. This is not naive optimism but an ethical commitment to what Braidotti calls ‘sustainable transformations’ – practices that work with the complexities of the present rather than seeking refuge in idealised pasts or utopian futures.41

Applied to Nüshu, Braidotti’s framework clarifies why matrilineal transmission matters: beyond mere preservation or romanticising women’s suffering, what is at stake is the recognition of creative capacities that persisted within constraint and continue to offer resources for contemporary feminist practice. To remember Nüshu through this affirmative lens is to look back while opening a space for future practices of care, solidarity and creative renewal. It is to ask what forms of relation, modes of transmission and practices of making and remembering might sustain us now – transformed rather than replicated, responsive to present conditions and orientated towards more liveable futures.

For artists, scholars and curators, Nüshu offers a vital challenge. It invites us to rethink what we value and why, to expand the boundaries of the archive and to imagine relations that do not reduce difference to sameness or fix the past in place. The implications are methodological, political and ethical: methodological in demanding new tools for apprehending practices that leave few traces; political in insisting that aesthetic value cannot be separated from power and exclusion; and ethical in requiring attentiveness to what cannot be fully recovered, translated, or possessed. It calls for practices of attention – slow, patient and attuned to the minor and ephemeral – that can hold open the space where fragile histories live. And it reminds us that survival is rarely a matter of monumentality; more often, it moves quietly, in the minor key, sustained by hands and voices across time.