Southwestern University psychology major Natalie Davis ’26 recently earned runner-up honors in ASIANetwork’s nationwide essay contest for her piece “Dueling Depictions: Zhang Zhixin and the Politics of Femininity in Chinese Scar Art.”

As part of the award, Davis was an invited guest at ASIANetwork’s annual conference in Atlanta, where she received recognition for her work and presented her essay during a poster session that included undergraduate student research from across the country.

“It was exciting and a good moment of recognition and confidence building,” Davis said. “I was flattered, but also really happy to see what other people researched. I don’t have a lot of experience with East Asian culture, religion, or politics, so it was really interesting to see all these niches that students found, questioned, and discovered answers to.”

In her award-winning essay, Davis contrasted two pieces of art from the Chinese “Scar art” era depicting Chinese martyr Zhang Zhixin. Zhang was a loyal communist who criticized many of Mao Zedong’s policies and was jailed, tortured, and publicly executed in 1975 at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). In 1979, four years after her death, she was rehabilitated and declared a “revolutionary martyr,” becoming an icon of speaking truth to power. Artists of the Scar era, the era following Mao’s death in 1976, selected Zhang as a subject for their works as they reflected on the pain and suffering that they endured during China’s Cultural Revolution.

Davis’ original inspiration to research the topic came during Associate Professor of Art History Allison Miller’s course, Art in China Since 1911. For her final essay in the course, Davis researched a single painting depicting Zhixin as youthful and feminine despite the circumstances surrounding her public death.

“She examined these representations of this revolutionary martyr and noticed how her representation signaled a lot of other things that were going on in terms of women’s rights in the late ’70s,” Dr. Miller said. “It’s a fascinating paper, and I encouraged her to submit it to the ASIANetwork competition.”

Davis spent the winter break expanding her essay from the five pages required for Dr. Miller’s course to the twelve pages required by ASIANetwork for the competition. To do this, she analyzed a second piece of art, a statue depicting Zhang nude on a horse. Both pieces portrayed Zhang in a feminized manner that was inconsistent with who she was in reality. Davis’ perspective as a psychology major gave her a unique view into the world of art history.

“I really like the idea of Paideia and making connections between two different disciplines,” Davis said. “My project was kind of like that in a way. I was drawing these connections between what I had learned in a feminist philosophy class I had taken the previous semester and what I learned in Professor Miller’s class. That previous knowledge allowed me to look at this historical event I was studying from a different perspective. I really did have a fun time researching.”

The ASIANetwork is a consortium of over 140 colleges and universities across North America that strives to strengthen the role of Asian Studies in liberal arts education. In addition to hosting the essay competition, the ASIANetwork’s annual conference draws researchers, faculty, and students from across North America and Asia for a three-day weekend of intensive exchange and collaboration.

“This was a national level conference for Asian Studies at liberal arts colleges,” Dr. Miller said. “Students from prestigious institutions across the country submitted essays for this essay prize, and she was selected. We’re extremely proud of her.”