Xiaoye Gu

Xiaoye's doctoral research investigates narrative images in painting and other visual and material media with themes of reclusion in the Yuan dynasty, a period of Mongol rule in China marked by profound socio-political transformation and intensified cross-cultural contact and exchange.

While reclusion had long been embedded in literati culture, the project approaches it as a fluid and contested concept, exploring how its visual articulation in Yuan paintings negotiates the relationship between inherited visual traditions and the specific conditions of the period, giving rise to significant formal and conceptual reconfiguration. It further investigates how reclusion-themed imagery moved across media, and how such movement reshaped the meaning, reception, and function of these visual narratives, foregrounding the complex interactions between media, audiences, and modes of representation through an approach attentive to visual narrativity and text-image relations, and informed by intermedial perspectives.

Xiaoye received her MA in History of Art and Archaeology of East Asia from SOAS in 2024 with Distinction. Her MA dissertation examined a Qing dynasty porcelain vase in the collection of the Guimet Museum, Paris, depicting a scene derived from the Ming vernacular painting Spring Dawn in the Han Palace, through the theoretical lens of intermediality. A version of this research was recently presented at the Association for Asian Studies 2026 Annual Conference.

Prior to her doctoral studies, Xiaoye worked as a Chinese Art Specialist at Bonhams Auctioneers in London. Her work, which encompassed research, cataloguing, as well as valuation and auctioneering, involved sustained close engagement with objects across a wide range of media. This experience fostered an object-based approach and sharpened her sensitivity to material, technical, and contextual distinctions between works, informing her current interest in painting and its relationships to other media.

Xiaoye also holds a BA in Law from Nankai University and an LLM from London School of Economics and Political Science.

• Visual art and material culture of dynastic China
• Visual narrativity
• Text–image relations
• Intermediality