Research

I am revising my manuscript, “Not Appropriate for a Scholar’s Study: A Cultural Biography of Night Banquet of Han Xizai. This project uses the infamous Chinese painting, Night Banquet of Han Xizai, as a lens to examine cultural practices that literally and figuratively surround Chinese painting. Traditionally, the acts of collecting and viewing art led to physical changes to the artwork itself. Such changes often included long texts that mediated and altered the painting’s meaning. This study examines such textual additions in order to understand the painting as a complex co-creation of painter and audiences over the centuries. Blending reception theory with cultural biography, a notion adapted from cultural anthropology, this study recasts a question central to art history: what is the role of art in a society?

I am currently preparing a paper, “Playing Cards with Cézanne: A Short History of the Western Canon in Contemporary Chinese Art,” for the February 2009 annual conference of the College Art Association. This paper will examine the appropriation of iconic images from the Western canon, from Huang Yong Ping’s The Hayfield of 1984 to Wang Qingsong’s recent photographic montages featuring nude models whose poses are plucked from the paintings of Ingres, Manet, and others, and Zhang Hongtu’s Repaint Chinese Landscape series.