Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting

Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting

by Yi Gu
Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting

Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting

by Yi Gu

Hardcover

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Overview

How did modern Chinese painters see landscape? Did they depict nature in the same way as premodern Chinese painters? What does the artistic perception of modern Chinese painters reveal about the relationship between artists and the nation-state? Could an understanding of modern Chinese landscape painting tell us something previously unknown about art, political change, and the epistemological and sensory regime of twentieth-century China?

Yi Gu tackles these questions by focusing on the rise of open-air painting in modern China. Chinese artists almost never painted outdoors until the late 1910s, when the New Culture Movement prompted them to embrace direct observation, linear perspective, and a conception of vision based on Cartesian optics. The new landscape practice brought with it unprecedented emphasis on perception and redefined artistic expertise. Central to the pursuit of open-air painting from the late 1910s right through to the early 1960s was a reinvigorated and ever-growing urgency to see suitably as a Chinese and to see the Chinese homeland correctly. Examining this long-overlooked ocular turn, Gu not only provides an innovative perspective from which to reflect on complicated interactions of the global and local in China, but also calls for rethinking the nature of visual modernity there.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674244443
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 06/16/2020
Series: Harvard East Asian Monographs , #430
Pages: 336
Product dimensions: 7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Yi Gu is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

Optical Vision and the Ocular Turn 4

Rethinking Modern Chinese Art 8

Materials, Methodology, and Chapter Summary 11

1 Open-Air Painting and the Modern Chinese Painter 16

"Sketching from Life" and Western-Style Painting 17

Scientizing Vision in China 21

The Rise of Open-Air Painting 28

Sketching the Homeland 35

2 Optical Vision and New Modes of Depiction 41

Qujing: View-Taking 43

Goutu: Composition 47

Toushi: Perspective 53

Shidian (Viewpoint) and Dipingxian (Horizon) 57

Guohua through the Optical Eye 60

Seeing Monumental Landscape at Mount Huang 65

Western-Style Painting and West Lake 71

3 Inventing Tradition through Open-Air Painting 80

Hu Peiheng and "Open-Air Painting in the Traditional Way" 82

Yu Jianhua and "Open-Air Painting in the Guohua Way" 85

Linear Perspective and "Sight" in Guohua Painting 89

Cun Models and the Prioritization of Perception 99

4 Open-Air Painting during the War 115

Guan Shanyue's Early Paintings and the Pursuit of Immediacy 117

The 1940 Guilin Exhibition and Debates on Wartime Art 126

Ten Thousand Miles of the Li River and Masculine Majesty 132

Heroism and the Northwestern Borderland 140

The Land of Production 150

5 Views of the Party-State 165

Open-Air Painting in the New China 167

Industrial Construction as Socialist Landscape 174

The Poetic Turn 182

New Look of Mountains and Streams 193

Beyond the State's View 207

Epilogue 221

Total Art: Perception as Critical Thinking 224

The Rise of Bases for Open-Air Painting and the Ossified View 228

Notes 235

Glossary 269

Bibliography 275

Index 305

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