The Power Reconstruction of the Gaze: A Postcolonial Re-examination of Orientalist Painting

Abstract

This paper takes Gérôme's A Roman Slave Market as its research object, employing postcolonial theory to re-examine the power mechanisms behind the "gaze" in 19th-century Orientalist painting. Drawing on Edward Said's "Orientalism" and Michel Foucault's analytical framework of the "gaze," it reveals how the artwork constructs the Orient as an exoticized and gendered "Other" through visual coding and spatial narratives, thereby serving the ideological needs of Western colonial expansion. Orientalist painting is not merely an aesthetic practice but also a visual vehicle of cultural hegemony. Through "visual violence," it naturalizes colonial logic, reinforces the East-West binary, and provides pathways for reflecting on the colonial legacy in art history.