Carlos Rojas begins his study of visuality in China with a look at the fascinating photographs of the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), who posed herself carefully for the camera. Indeed, these 1903–5 images, captured by court photographer Xunling, vividly catch the complexities of visual representation and practice during the chaotic and nonlinear transition from traditional to modern ways of perception. Rojas's research confirms that a photo may not lie, but cracking its meaning is no trivial pursuit. Rojas deciphers the gazes of Cixi, Xunling, and Cixi's attendant Deling to outline the development of three discourses of visuality that he identifies as belonging to the late imperial period, the mid-twentieth century, and contemporary times, although they are uncannily already represented in the perspectives of these three.

The book is organized into three parts, which elaborate on three different types of visuality through an interpretive analysis of literature, art, photography, and film. Rojas assumes that the modes of visuality of any given period correspond to its sociocultural tendencies and thus contain clues that will open doors to the more enigmatic and abstract shape of the times. Part I, “Specularity,” discusses work by Li Ruzhen and Chen Sen, and their use of the mirror gaze to dig into a central social concern of the period, gender differentiation and sexual orientation. Part II, “Spectatorship,” looks at Wumingshi, Jin Yong, and Eileen Chang to investigate the sense of being observed from the outside that resulted from China's intensifying relations with the West. These perspectives break apart in the contemporary period, when the categories of the Chinese and the foreign become blurred. In part III, “Screened Projections,” Rojas traces a sophisticated engagement with images as complex visual constructs in the work of Li Yung-ping, Gao Xingjian, Wang Shuo, and Chu T'ien-wen.

Craig Clunas has extended recent inquiry on visuality into Chinese studies. Rojas continues this project, using a modified Freudian-Lacanian approach and yet arguing that he avoids the implied universalism of the psychoanalytic model by “rehistoricizing” it. He does so through an involuted reasoning similar to that used in the interpretation of the photographs, in which Rojas is able to extract a framework of visuality from Cixi's photos by distilling the positions occupied and enacted by Cixi, Xunling, and Deling into separate visual modes. Rojas's tendency to favor a deconstructionist modus operandi is quite pronounced throughout the book, as he argues that each of the visual modes contains elements of the others within it. In keeping with this methodology, as well as his psychoanalytical approach, Rojas argues that Lacan's mirror-stage theoretical model contains knowledge of temporality and historicity, and therefore in its very being transcends universalism. It is unclear how this approach can erase the tendency of psychoanalytical theory to see the mind of all times and places as fundamentally the same. Additionally, I find that Rojas uncritically accepts, at times almost luridly so, Freud's centering of sexual desire within the unconscious as universal.

Nonetheless, The Naked Gaze leaves no doubt that an investigation of visuality can yield clues about unrecognized assumptions that structure time, space, and being. Rojas's study brings this important theoretical viewpoint into modern Chinese cultural studies, and from this perspective, he contributes well-argued, insightful, and thought-provoking interpretations. Even more importantly, Rojas shows how images emerge through interaction or in dialogue with the pressing issues of the times, building particular ways of seeing and understanding vision. Wumingshi's 1949 novel Golden Night of the Serpent deploys references to the Taoist mirror as a metaphor for the soul and revolves around themes of visibility and invisibility as protagonist Yin Di jaunts through the controversies of the first half of the twentieth century. Rojas's chapter on Eileen Chang skillfully interprets Chang's fascination with photographs and masks as a form of Othering that emerges from the complicated history in which she lived.

The book's tight organization loses focus as Rojas branches into contemporary culture, where he stretches to adapt the target of his analysis to his theoretical framework. To some extent, this happens because the profusion of texts, films, media, and artifacts at our disposal now means that many approaches to visuality exist simultaneously, from a purely mimetic grasp to a heightened awareness of projection and simulacrum. Yet overall, Rojas does a good job of showing us where the postmodern perspective is both deeply sensed within China and also revealing of important trends in Chinese culture. I especially enjoyed his discussion of Chu T'ien-wen's 1994 novel Notes of a Desolate Man. Chu's persistent engagement with nostalgia and its meaning in Taiwan, here through the photograph and other visual images, is well worth sustained exploration.

Despite my criticisms, Rojas's most fundamental claim—that ways of seeing and sensing the visual change both massively and subtly according to historical period, and that those changes can be located and profitably understood in various cultural artifacts—is convincing and intriguing. Not only China scholars, but also those interested in the visual more generally, should read this book.