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Podcast: New Books in Art
Episode: Yi Gu, "Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Description: Yi Gu's Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting (Harvard UP, 2020) examines the rise of open-air painting in 20th-century China, showing how this emphatically new form of landscape painting precipitated and participated in an ocular turn. In its urgent embrace of Cartesian optics and its interrelationship with new technologies like photography, open-air painting taught Chinese artists (and citizens) new, modern "ways of seeing." Gu traces the birth of the form in the early 20th century, showing readers the rise of this new perceptual mode not only through close analysis of painting, but also through her rich archive of sources like...