Yang Kuei Fei

Yang Guifei (Yang Kuei Fei) — the legendary Tang dynasty imperial consort whose beauty was said to have caused the downfall of an emperor — rendered here in Mayumi Oda's signature style of voluptuous, joyful female figures drawing simultaneously on Buddhist iconography and feminist vision. The 1978 date places this work in the middle of Oda's New York period, when she was developing the mature visual language that would make her reputation: figures of extraordinary physical presence that are simultaneously erotic, sacred, and politically charged. Yang Guifei's complex historical role — as victim of political violence and as the embodiment of "dangerous beauty" in patriarchal historiography — makes her an ideal subject for Oda's revisionist feminist iconography.