Students of modern Chinese art encounter any number of challenges, including the loss and destruction of artworks, vast yet unexamined archives, multiple dense narrative threads, and persistent simplistic invocations of east/west and tradition/modernity. Our understanding of this complex era is far from incomplete and undertheorized. Nevertheless, its study has benefited from recent investigations into the intense participation of twentieth-century Chinese artists in global and transcultural artistic trends, styles, movements, and concerns.

In the case of Yi Gu's Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting, the author considers the arrival of plein-airism in China and its importance to new concepts of vision and visuality. The act of direct observation through painting or drawing outdoors, open-air art practices or xiesheng, could redefine the artist's visual and conceptual relationship to their subjects. As Gu demonstrates, open-air art's associations with truthfulness had far-reaching implications for new ways of seeing and understanding the traditional subject of landscape, role of the artist, and even China itself. “Realism” or a vision-based mimeticism has long haunted histories of Chinese art as a kind of cultural opposite or flip side; by investigating its twentieth-century associations with modes of seeing considered scientific and accurate, Gu unpacks what open-air art and “ocularity” could bring to a newly seen Chinese and national landscape.

The book's five chapters move chronologically through shifting examples of xiesheng practices, from the 1910s and early Republic into the early People's Republic of China. The first chapter examines the arrival of open-air painting and “sketching from life,” and their application at art academies and by artists dedicated to reformed artmaking. Gu documents these efforts through art publications, journals, and artists’ writings, investigating the application of these practices beyond artistic pedagogies to the education of average citizens, transforming their envisioning of the world to one verifiably scientific and modern. The responsibility—and ability—of the artist to speak for fellow countrymen and women is one of the more important points of this book, and Gu is quick to point out how parallel developments in transportation, tourism, and science (such as geology) dovetail to promote modern conceptions of the nation itself as directly experienced by the clear-sighted, dedicated artist-citizen.

In chapter 2, Gu considers the expansion of artistic practices linked with mimetic vision in terms of constructing or “taking” a view, qujing. Linear perspective had been present in China since at least the seventeenth century, but the twentieth century saw a burst of discussions on perspective, composition, fixed viewpoints, and horizon lines. These practices extended even to ink or “national painting,” guohua—old and new. Song-era monumental ink landscape was reinvented in the 1930s with proliferating views of Mount Huang, now also invested with optical perspective. Chapter 3 considers the impact of observational art practices on landscapes of the past through Republican-era art histories. These art histories, made possible by increased access to older artworks and new print technologies, were also new national histories and could rewrite the past, sometimes by retroactively inserting mimetic seeing into older art works. Landscape painting's foundational cun or brushstroke models, once linked to the painter's autographic and expressive mark making, could now simultaneously represent prestigious artistic lineages and correlate with observed nature as a systematic record of China's vast topographies.

Chapters 4 and 5 follow open-air art practices into the 1940s and later. War and conflict in the 1940s made it possible for artists such as the young Guan Shanyue to record the threatened national landscape with patriotic clarity. Seeking out new subjects and frontiers, whether landscapes of devastation, those of the hinterland and border regions, or even the industrial landscape, Guan and others also chose appropriate visual languages to render wartime cultural and political views. The final chapter crosses 1949 to examine the landscapes of New China. Open-air art practices could continue to be relevant in politically “truthful” renderings of the socialist landscape but could also draw suspicion with calls for revolutionary emotion and stylistic innovations in the later 1950s. The project of envisioning China clearly and on behalf of its people continued to be taken up by cultural workers, but the unattainability of this mission became ever clearer.

The epilogue confirms this with the example of contemporary artist Qiu Zhijie and his Total Art program, with its turn away from ongoing academic open-air artmaking. Instead, Total Art required art students to pursue independent questioning and fieldwork in order to support critical thinking skills, ultimately achieving only a limited success.

Gu's project is one that looks closely, critically, and widely. The author writes an ambitious new history of the modern Chinese landscape and, in the process of doing so, excavates numerous forgotten artists, works, movements, and debates that proceed from complex ideas of seeing accurately. This may lay too great a burden at the door of xiesheng and open-air artmaking, but this considered and deeply historicized account should be welcomed by anyone with an interest in modern Chinese art histories.