I am a scholar of art and visual culture with a focus on Asia, especially China. My research interests include cold war visual culture and post-socialist art, comparative media studies, Chinese photography history, contemporary photography in Asia, mass art and amateurism, and visual methodologies across disciplines.
As I belong to the generations of students whose formative years came after the visual cultural turn, my studies, even when looking at paintings securely within the canon, are more interested in artwork’s role in epistemic shifts and subject formations. I am also drawn to the transnational flows of objects, people, practices, and ideas. Ultimately, what drives my inquiries are the political ambitions and social functions of art, as well as the politics of aesthetics. My recent study has been driven by my observation of the phenomena of aesthetic capitalism and digital surveillance in China today. They are leading me to new domains, such as a media archaeology of the Digital Countryside initiative, and a study of the CCP aesthetics anchored in an agrarian imaginary.
I am currently an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. I teach undergraduate courses on modern and contemporary Asian art, lens-based media in Asia, public art, and art and digital culture at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media. I work with graduate students at the Graduate Department of Art History. I am an affiliated faculty member of the Department of East Asian Studies.
I am the co-editor (with Thy Phu and Deepali Dewan) of Trans Asia Photography.
Contact: Yi.Gu@utoronto.ca