Painting Architecture

Comprehensive research on a unique painting genre from fourteenth-century China

In Painting Architecture, Leqi Yu conducts comprehensive research on jiehua, or ruled-line painting, a unique painting genre in fourteenth-century China. This genre relies on tools like rulers to represent architectural details and structures accurately. Such technical consideration and mechanical perfection linked this painting category with the builder's art, which led to the belittling of Chinese elites and eventually won the admiration of Mongol patrons. Yu argues that painters in the Yuan dynasty made new efforts towards a unique modular system and an unsurpassable plain-drawing tradition. She argues that these two strategies made architectural paintings in the Yuan dynasty entirely different from their predecessors, as well as making the art form extremely difficult for subsequent painters to imitate.