Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China

chapters, Yi Gu analyzes paintings by individual artists from the early part of the century through the tumultuous years of the Japanese invasion and the socialist age that followed. A brief epilogue traces the continuing history of open-air painting as landscapes themselves change in China. Art schools still require some open-air painting experience. There are sufficient illustrations with curatorial information and copious notes and bibliography. Following Yi Gu’s vivid but detailed explanation, we would gain better understanding why so many artistic activities promoted by different groups and academies all around China as a promising business, in remote countryside and villages, and in urban areas with new inspiring attractions. I want to refer “aerial perspective” to one artistic case. In the morning light, Leonardo da Vinci observed distant objects, such as mountains, which looked bluer and less clear than nearby mountains. He also noticed that the farther the mountain is, the closer its color is to the color of the surrounding air. His experiments show that if the artist wants to correctly color the scenes of different distances and nears, he should follow the subsequent practices that to depict the nearest scene in real colors; use a darker blue for the scene behind it in proportion and use deeper for the scene behind it. Leonardo da Vinci summed it up as follows, “If an object is five times away, its blue should be five times darker.” The modern definition of “aerial perspective” is this term describes how air conditions affect our perception of distant objects. The closer the scene is to the horizon (or farther away), the lighter its tones, the blurrier the details, and the bluer or colder the colors. After reading Yi Gu’s book, we feel just the opposite. We have a clearer and fresher view of open-air painting in China and how they have reflected social, political, and cultural changes from the very beginning of open-air painting since 1910s.