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Book Cover
E-book
Author Gu, Yi, author.

Title Chinese ways of seeing and open-air painting / Gu Yi
Published Cambridge (Massachusetts) : Harvard University Asia Center, 2020
©2020

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Description 1 online resource (xv, 317 pages) : illustrations
Series Harvard East Asian monographs ; 430
Harvard East Asian monographs ; 430.
Contents Open-air painting and the modern Chinese painter -- Optical vision and new modes of depiction -- Inventing tradition through open-air painting -- Open-air painting during the war -- Views of the party-state
Summary 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
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Landscape painting, Chinese -- 20th century.
Landscape painting, Chinese -- Technique
Landscape painting, Chinese
Landscape painting, Chinese -- Technique
Landschaftsmalerei
China.
China
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781684176137
1684176131