Leqi Yu is an Assistant Professor of Han-Tang Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Her research interests span East Asian art and archaeology, with a special focus on Song-Ming painting history and cross-cultural exchange. She received her BA in Philosophy from Peking University, her MA in the history of art from Williams College, and her PhD in East Asian languages and civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania. She has held a Smithsonian Institution history of art postdoctoral fellowship at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.
In her monograph Painting Architecture: Jiehua in Yuan China, 1271-1368 (Hong Kong University Press, 2022), Leqi Yu has conducted comprehensive research on jiehua or ruled-line painting, a unique painting genre in fourteenth-century China. This genre relies on tools such as 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 Chinese elites’ belittlement and won Mongol patrons’ admiration. Yu suggests 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.
Books and Selected Publications
Painting Architecture: Jiehua in Yuan China, 1271-1368 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022).
“A Problem of Attribution: A Rediscovered Chinese Landscape Painting in the University of Pennsylvania Museum,” Arts Asiatiques, no. 72 (2017).
“The Power of Ambiguity: Bada Shanren’s Personal Marks,” Sino-Platonic Papers, no.264
(Dec 2016).
Fellowships and Grants
2019 The Smithsonian Institution Postdoctoral Fellowship Award
2017 Predissertation-Summer Travel Grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/ ACLS Program in China Studies
2015-2019 Four-year Benjamin Franklin Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania
2012-2014 Two-year Graduate Art Fellowship from Williams College
