Welcome back to our CLCF profile series, where each month we interview a CLCF researcher to hear more about their research (check out our previous profiles here). To start off this academic year, we’re chatting with Dr. Yi Gu about her research in art history, media studies, and critical digital studies. Yi is an Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the University of Toronto. Read the interview below to learn more about her research into digital twins, rural China, and more!

Rafael: In a nutshell, who are you as a researcher?

Yi: Thank you for the question. I’m an art historian by training, although these days the things I study do not always look like conventional objects of art history. Most of my published work has been on twentieth-century Chinese art and photography, with some work on contemporary art and Cold War cultural exchanges. But even in that earlier work, I was never interested only in artworks as self-contained objects. Questions of epistemology and subject formation—how people come to know the world and how they come to understand and imagine themselves—have always been central to what I do.

My recent projects—there are a few, some more directly aligned with CLCF than others—lie at the intersection of art history, media studies, and critical digital studies. One route into this newer work came through my research on visual culture in Mao-era China. I became fascinated by forms such as the magic lantern, which remained widely used in China into the late 1970s, blackboard newspapers, diagrams, and other forms of mass visual production. The state relied enormously on ordinary people to produce images and other visual materials that disseminated state messages. There is something very compelling about that mass creativity—it can seem participatory, even emancipatory—but the state also harnessed this creativity to build a vast media apparatus for political mobilization, discipline, and control. That made me begin to see unexpected and sometimes uncanny resonances between Mao-era mass art and contemporary digital platforms.

Another line of inquiry opened when I began doing fieldwork in rural China, initially for the epilogue of my first book. One thing led to another, and I found myself increasingly interested in the growing importance of data, digital platforms, and data visualization in rural governance. That eventually brought me to China’s Digital Countryside initiative. When I began my fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re) in Aachen, Germany, last year, I thought I would study its dashboards and data visualizations. But once I had time to look more closely, I became much more interested in what was underneath many of those interfaces: highly realistic, continuous three-dimensional models of territory. That led me to my current project on Real-Scene 3D China (shijing sanwei zhongguo, 实景三维中国), an extraordinarily ambitious national effort to construct something approaching a digital twin of the entire country, with a striking emphasis on visual realism.

It is worth mentioning that the discipline of art history, interestingly, has never been confined to “Art” with a capital A. Our training teaches us to pay very close attention to form, materiality, visual conventions, techniques, and processes of making. Those forms of attention can tell us a great deal about things that are not normally considered artworks, for example a diagram, a dashboard, or a digital three-dimensional model of a country. That is probably what I am most interested in as a researcher: using an art historian’s sensitivity to how things take form to ask broader questions about knowledge and power.

In the case of digital twins, for example, there is already substantial scholarship on their applications and limits. But I can’t imagine understanding a phenomenon without understanding how it is made. Following how Real-Scene 3D China is actually constructed can reveal assumptions, imaginaries, institutional histories, and relations between human labour and automation that are much harder to see when we encounter only the finished interface or focus only on its applications. That, increasingly, is where I see my work sitting—somewhere between art history and media studies, using the making of visual forms as a way into much larger systems.

 

M.E.: You do a lot of your work in rural China. Can you share something about that research and how you build those relationships over time?

Yi: Before I talk about how I built those relationships, I should probably explain why rural China became so important to my research in the first place. For people who are less familiar with China, it is important to understand that the urban-rural divide there is rather distinctive. Since the early years of the People’s Republic, the population has been divided into urban and rural household residents. Urban residents had access to public health care, free education, and retirement benefits—what many progressives in the West might regard as some of the great achievements of socialist China—while rural residents, or peasants, did not. This status was determined by birth and was exceedingly difficult to change. The rapid industrialization of socialist China was only possible through resources extracted from the countryside. Chinese peasants suffered greatly as the state diverted agricultural surplus to subsidize urban and industrial development. After the reform era, China’s economic rise again depended heavily on rural populations, whose cheap migrant labor helped China become the world’s factory. While a series of state policies have attempted to address the dire conditions of rural China, even today rural residents are often among the last to benefit from economic growth and the first to shoulder the pressure when the economy contracts.

My interest in rural China also came from a growing awareness of what it meant to have grown up in Shanghai. I had always thought of my family as very ordinary and not particularly privileged. My parents were workers, and they belonged to a generation that was itself eventually badly affected by Shanghai’s industrial restructuring. But it was only much later, when I became a student of twentieth-century Chinese history, that I began to understand that even my relatively modest urban upbringing was privileged in relation to the countryside. The education I received, the relative abundance of medical resources, and many other things I simply took for granted were all part of a system that transferred resources from the countryside to the cities.

That realization coincided with a disciplinary concern. Modern and contemporary Chinese art history has also been overwhelmingly urban in its orientation. We study Beijing, Shanghai, major art institutions, professional artists, and other metropolitan cultural networks. Yet for much of the twentieth century, the majority of China’s population lived in the countryside. So I became increasingly interested in going beyond Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Some of my other work—for example, my research on Mao-era mass visual practices—is is also part of that attempt.

My fieldwork in rural China began in 2018, somewhat serendipitously. I was initially planning to visit several sites for the epilogue of my first book. I was extraordinarily fortunate that scholars and friends in China introduced me to people whose networks extended far beyond the metropolitan academic world. Those introductions led to other introductions, and local collaborators helped me find people to talk with, navigate places that would otherwise have been inaccessible to me, and sometimes simply understand what I was seeing.

I want to emphasize how dependent my work on rural China has been on people’s generosity. I am a Shanghai/Toronto urbanite. I don’t drive. While Mandarin, or Putonghua, is the state language, many Chinese people use local dialects in their daily lives, and the linguistic differences can be enormous. My own language capacities are uneven: as a native Shanghainese speaker, I can understand quite a few dialects in Jiangsu and Zhejiang and, to some extent, neighbouring regions. But elsewhere I often needed help, particularly when speaking with older people who did not use standard Mandarin comfortably. Without people willing to make introductions, accompany me, explain local circumstances, and share their knowledge, much of this work simply could not have happened. Unfortunately, under the current circumstances, I cannot properly name and acknowledge many of the people who helped me because I don’t want my work to put them at risk.

What began as a fairly limited research trip expanded very quickly. Over several periods of fieldwork, I traveled through six provinces and visited numerous towns and villages spanning a very wide range of rural conditions and village types. That breadth of experience did two important things for me. First, although I already knew that rural China was far from homogeneous, the trips helped me begin to understand where those differences actually lay. Being in many different places gave me a much more concrete sense of what kinds of distinctions I needed to pay attention to.

Second, a few of the places I visited had already been the subjects of extensive scholarly research, including long-term anthropological fieldwork. Being in those places myself was enormously instructive because it allowed me to read that scholarship differently. I began to see not only what those studies had made visible, but also what even very careful, deeply embedded research could not fully capture. I don’t mean this as a criticism of those scholars. Quite the opposite: it made me much more conscious of the inevitable limits of any researcher’s access and perspective, no matter how long one spends in a community.

Those field trips gave me an experiential framework for reading other sources. Even now, years later, when I encounter a policy document, an image of a rural dashboard in a so-called Smart Village, or a government description of digital agriculture, I read it partly through what I learned from being in those places. But that kind of fieldwork became increasingly difficult after 2020. COVID initially made travel impossible, but the larger change has been the increasingly challenging research environment in China. The revised Counter-Espionage Law, which came into effect in 2023, has forced me to change how I do research.

Much of my current research on rural China therefore draws on an approach developed by scholars working on Xinjiang under even more severe constraints, which they call remote ethnography. Remote ethnography does not mean simply conducting conventional ethnography online. Instead, it brings together many different kinds of evidence that remain accessible from a distance and asks how they can be contextualized, checked against one another, and read together. My own research on Real-Scene 3D China relies heavily on local government documents, social-media posts, training videos, technical publications, corporate materials, policy documents, and archival sources. I try to read these materials across one another, but also through what I learned from my earlier fieldwork. In other words, the digital space is not really my object of study. It has become one of the principal means through which I can continue studying rural China without asking collaborators or informants to assume risks on my behalf.

 

Daphne: What is your star sign?

I’m a Capricorn with Libra rising—organized in theory, but in reality still meaning to submit that long-overdue reimbursement form!