58 women artists
article length
median
397 words
max
2857 words
222 male artists
median
314 words
max
7171 words

Wikipedia is user-contributed and therefore may read as a good reflection of the internet’s collective knowledge. But it is a very Western-centric view, and Asian women artists are extremely under-represented. There are currently only fifty-eight women categorised as Hong Kong women artists on Wikipedia, and their articles have an average length of six hundred words—half that of an average Wikipedia article.

On the other hand, there are 222 Wikipedia pages for male Hong Kong artists—four times the number of women, with the longest article at more than double the average word count.

Even within the existing articles, almost half of the women are missing basic biographical information (denoted in red), such as date and place of birth, years active, and occupation.

* According to wikicount.net, a third-party aggregator.

Help us expand articles that are missing basic biographical information (denoted in red). Help us surface more artists through this project by creating and categorising articles as ‘Hong Kong women artists’.

METHODOLOGY

A list of women artists was gathered by scraping (programmatically reading through) the ‘Hong Kong women artists’ page. A list of male artists was gathered by scraping every article and every subcategory page under the wider ‘Hong Kong artists’ category and subtracting the women artists from that list. Artist details were then gathered via the MediaWiki API, which returned data such as summaries, backlinks, and references. Word count was calculated by looping through every article section and adding up the number of words.

As a user-contributed website, Wikipedia is prone to mistakes. Pages can be categorised incorrectly, such as when a male artist was accidentally tagged as female. There are also ambiguities in how a user might define ‘artist’ (does this include actresses, for example?), how they might qualify ‘Hong Kong based’, and, most importantly, how they might account for gender, which can be self-defined or non-binary. Finally, because the pages were only scraped in English, the data set is inherently skewed towards a Western perspective.

As the work continues to live online, we hope it will inspire contributions on Wikipedia. The data set will be updated every six months with articles added to the ‘Hong Kong women artists’ category.

Last updated 01 August, 2019

Created with 💖 by Shirley Wu with technical support from Matt DesLauriers | Commissioned by M+, 2020

hong kong
filmmakers, painters,
architects, musicians,
screenwriters, sculptors,
cartoonists, actresses,
fashion designers,
photographers, poets,
artists, women.

A data visualisation by Shirley Wu | Commissioned by M+, 2020.

hong kong
artists, women.

Last December, I published Legends, a data visualisation highlighting the fifty-one female Nobel Laureates since 1901. In those same 117 years, there have been 853 male Laureates. These numbers are another shocking reminder of the structural underrepresentation we still face as women. I have since become determined to visualise more women-centred data sets.

Hong Kong artists, women is an extension of Legends, with a distinct call to action. It is based on a list of Hong Kong women artists with English articles on Wikipedia—entries that are user-generated. Developed in collaboration with M+, it is also a response to the museum’s ongoing effort to increase the representation of Asian women artists and makers online through initiatives such as Wikipedia Edit-a-thons.

Most importantly, Hong Kong artists, women celebrates their accomplishments and addresses the pervasive underrepresentation of women. I invite you to fly through this landscape and explore. Linger on an artist, visit her Wikipedia page, consider and share her work.

how to read
this visualisation

I grew up with a set of Chinese ink paintings in my childhood home, each depicting the same mountain range in different seasons. I always found those mountains awe inspiring. I love the metaphor of these Hong Kong women artists as mountains—powerful, resilient, majestic, and rising above the mist.

article length

artist ‘influence’

artist references


The height of each mountain represents the word count of the corresponding artist’s Wikipedia page. The colour represents the number of other Wikipedia pages that mention her. The number of peaks represents the number of references at the bottom of the page. The mountains are surrounded by stars, each representing a male contemporary on Wikipedia.

about this data set

The Wikipedia data set was pulled from the ‘Hong Kong women artists’ category, which is created through user-based tagging of Wikipedia’s existing articles. The resulting data set was small since many articles have not yet been tagged (or, indeed, created), but it remains Wikipedia’s only categorised list of Hong Kong women artists. The articles that do exist are often short, lacking basic information and citations.

The shortcomings of this user-generated data set become clear as you explore the terrain of the visualisation; many of the mountains are not very tall—meaning that the articles are not so fleshed out—or are lightly coloured to show that there is little research supporting what does exist. Based, as they are, on individual Wikipedia users’ ad hoc additions to the site, these mountains are not a conclusive reflection of the artists’ individual achievements.

EN |