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

In Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting, Yi Gu examines the rise of xiesheng (translated here as “open-air painting,” derived from the French plein-air) in twentieth-century China, which entails the normalization of the “fixed viewing position” and “Euclidean optics” over the standard perceptual modes of earlier ages. Pleinairism was first promoted in the nineteenth century by the French Barbizon School as a way to capture light and atmosphere more effectively than in the studio, and more famously by Monet and the Impressionists. Its popularity was inextricable from the invention of oil paint in tin tubes in 1841. In Gu’s study, however, the focus is on ink and color painting on paper, termed “guohua” (national painting), and on Chinese agency and “ways of seeing.” While taking into consideration the scientific underpinnings of the open-air approach, Gu rejects what she calls the “impact-response model” that prioritizes “Western influence” (p. 9); and she does not replace that framework with a China-centric traditionalism, which ink brush painting is presumed to embody. In place of both, this book posits the importance of the artist’s creative and corporeal subjectivity. Through encountering scenery directly and personally, creators established new relationships with Chinese geography, recorded their survival during civil strife and the Japanese invasion, and contended with the Nationalist Party’s coercion and Communist didacticism.

A new visuality through painting outdoors, which is somewhat uncritically conflated in this book with making preparatory sketches for works to be finished in the studio, is shown to overtake the varied compositional logic of the Chinese painting tradition. Called the “ocular turn,” this visuality does not propound a set rubric of “Chineseness,” but reflects artists’ intellectual positions as they negotiated the shifting ideologies of the twentieth century. Broadly speaking, their approaches are still about national self-strengthening, but not in the nineteenth-century sense of “learning barbarian methods to combat barbarian threats.” Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting situates the open-air method in the larger project of reshaping citizens to meet the demands of a modern age. In addition to iconographic and formalistic analyses, Gu draws on a rich array of art-world sources and cultural artifacts, including instructional manuals, readings for children, and popular guidebooks that are not easily accessible. Rather than trying to mimic Europeans, the pleinairists of the Early Republican era saw themselves as part of the intellectual elite responsible for introducing modern, educated men and women to essential knowledge (p. 51). The insights they imparted had correlations with portrait photography, industrial drawing, physics, and so forth.

Chapter 1 traces open-air painting to the fledgling Western-style sketching from life, which was partly mediated by Japanese modern art education. It was propagated as the antidote to using plaster casts and nude models, which had started in the 1910s. Reflecting the ethos of the New Culture Movement, which endorsed scientism for all forms of inquiry, open-air painting in conjunction with sketching from life came to be seen as indispensable to national strengthening. An important insight from this chapter is the performative aspect of open-air painting, as opposed to other life-drawing practices conducted indoors. Pencils, easels, and sketch-pads in hand, these artists attracted the curious gaze of passersby. Bodily engagement with the landscape familiar to and shared with the nonartistic communities became part of the artists’ identity. In search of subjects, Western-style painters in China, eventually joined by grade-school children and those working in the ink medium, formed a new breed of artists (including women) on the move, traveling in groups by train, and so forth. The artists’ photographed activities, often used as advertising for the academies eager to attract students and favorable public opinion, also gave open-air painting a modernist cachet. These images radically revised the perception of artists as male literati ensconced in their studios...