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Podcast: New Books in Women's History
Episode: Ying-Chen Peng, "Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi's Image Making" (Yale UP, 2023)
Description: Ying-chen Pengâs Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixiâs Image Making is a beautiful new volume on late Qing imperial art practice from Yale University Press (forthcoming in 2023). Pengâs book, rigorously researched and richly illustrated, presents a revisionist biography of the Empress Dowager through an analysis of her patronage and participation in making art. Each chapter follows Cixiâs her âartfully subversiveâ command of various media forms, from photography and portraiture, to architecture, porcelain, painting, and calligraphy. Considering Cixi as a patron and artist in her own right, Peng frames the regent as a canny political and aesthetic strategist who...