Gu, Yi Ma

Biography

My research focuses on the art and visual culture of China’s long twentieth century. I aspire to locate objects, practices, and ideas that reveal the interconnection of artistic pursuits, epistemological modes, and the construction of modern subjects and the nation state. I am also drawn to the transnational dimensions of modern Chinese art, which are often obscured by the reductive binary structure of West versus East. These inquiries are manifested in my studies on photography history and my book Open-Air Painting and Chinese Ways of Seeing (forthcoming, Harvard University Press Asia Centre). Recently I have been fascinated by the intense exchanges of art works, publications, exhibitions, theories, and delegations between China and the other socialist “brother” nations. I am in the process of developing a new project on Chinese socialist visual culture. Re-contextualizing the socialist period within the modernizing attempts of China’s long twentieth century, this study highlights China’s continuous engagement with an international order that was collectively imagined and painstakingly maintained. More importantly, questions that once occupied the socialist cultural world, such as the nature of artistic labor, the responsibility and ability of art in forging a sense of collectivity, and the tension between an ideal of the universal and the persistence of national sentiments, have remained key issues in contemporary art production, art history on global modernism and critical studies on globalization. My rethinking of Socialist Chinese visual culture will therefore echo current debates by historicizing an important, yet forgotten, antecedent of globality.

Research Interest

Modern Chinese art and visual culture; Cold war visual culture; Cultural production in contemporary China; Chinese photography history.