Yi Gu

Biography
Yi GU is an associate professor of modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a focus on Asia especially China. Her research interests include cold war visual culture and post-socialist art, comparative media studies, Chinese photography history and contemporary photography in Asia, politics of aesthetics, data visualization, and visual methodologies across disciplines. Her book Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting (Harvard University Press Asia Center, 2020) points out an ocular turn of China’s twentieth century as a foundation for a revisionist history of modern Chinese art. She is currently completing a manuscript on socialist data visualization and China's contemporary Digital Countryside initiative. She is a co-editor of open-access academic journal Trans Asia Photography and a convening member of the research project “Recalibrating Postwar Chinese Art: Digital Humanities and Alternative Archives.”
Education
Ph.D. 2009 History of Art and Architecture, Brown University
Dissertation: “Scientising Vision in China: Photography, Outdoor Sketching, and the Reinvention of Landscape Perception, 1912-1949”
Supervisor: Professor Douglas Nickel
M.A. 2002 Archaeology and Museum Studies, Fudan University
B.A. 1999 Chinese Literature, Fudan University
Publications
Gu, Yi. Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting. Harvard University Asia Center, 2020.
Book.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674244443
ISBN 9780674244443
Gu, Yi “Which East, Whose South: Reflections on Art of the Socialist Bloc.” On Our Time, no. 2 Constellations of Intimacies, 2021.
Journal article
https://www.timesmuseum.org/en/journal/floating-constellation/which-eas….
Gu, Yi. “What’s in a Name? Photography and the Reinvention of Visual Truth in China, 1840-1911.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 95, no. 1, 2013, pp. 120–38.
Journal article
https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2013.10786109
Gu, Yi. “We Love Peace: Photographic Effect and Chinese People’s Volunteer Force Soldiers in the Korean War.” The Chinese Historical Review, vol. 25, no. 2, 2018, pp. 196–207.
Journal article
https://doi.org/10.1080/1547402X.2018.1524431
Gu, Yi. “The ‘Peasant Problem’ and Time in Contemporary Chinese Art.” Representations, vol. 136, no. 1, Nov. 2016, pp. 54–76.
Journal article
https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2016.136.1.54.
Gu, Yi. “Photography and Its Chinese Origins.” Photography and Its Origins, edited by Tanya Sheehan and Andres Zervigon, Routledge, 2015, pp. 157–70.
Chapter
https://www.routledge.com/Photography-and-Its-Origins/Sheehan-Zervigon/…
Gu, Yi. “Powkee and the Era of Large Studios.” Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan, edited by Roberta Wue and Luke Gartlan, Ashgate, 2017, pp. 59–76.
Chapter
https://www.routledge.com/Portraiture-and-Early-Studio-Photography-in-C…
Gu, Yi. “Prince Chun Through the Lens.” Ars Orientalis, vol. 43, 2013, pp. 125–38.
Journal article
Public Engagement
"Magic Lantern and the Dark Matter of Mao's Art World" (2 episodes, in Chinese)
Podcast
July 13 and July 19, 2021 (2 hr in total)
橫豎橫#20 | 幻燈和大眾藝術:五六十年代藝術世界中的“暗物質”
橫豎橫#21 | 幻燈和大眾藝術:五六十年代藝術世界中的“暗物質”(下)