Wen Fong

Wen C. Fong (; 1930 – October 3, 2018) was a Chinese-American historian of East Asian art. He was the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Art History at Princeton University, where he taught Chinese art history for 45 years. In 1959 he co-founded the first doctoral program in Chinese art and archaeology in the United States, which was later expanded to include Japan. He served as chairman of Princeton's Department of Art and Archaeology, and as consultative chairman for Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Early life and education Fong was born in Shanghai in 1930. As a child he studied under the calligrapher Li Jian (; 1881–1956). Fong held his personal calligraphy exhibition at the age of 10 and was acclaimed as a prodigy. He enrolled at Shanghai Jiao Tong University before moving to the United States to study at Princeton University in 1948.

At Princeton Fong studied under Kurt Weitzmann and George Rowley, In 1954, he joined the faculty of Princeton while still studying for his Ph.D.,

From 1971 to 2000, Fong also served as a special consultant, and later consultative chairman, for Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was purchased and donated to the museum by the financier Oscar Tang, Fong's brother-in-law. Cahill made an explosive argument that the painting was a fake created by the 20th-century master painter and forger Zhang Daqian,

Fong also served as Corresponding Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica in Taiwan and was elected as an academician of Academia Sinica in 1992. He was also elected to the American Philosophical Society that same year.

Legacy The Wen C. and Constance Fong Library，a specialized art and archaeology library at the Zhejiang University Museum of Art and Archaeology is named in his honour. It was Wen Fong who suggested creating China's first teaching museum focused on undergraduate art history at Zhejiang University.

Personal life In the 1950s, Fong married Constance Tang Fong , whom he had met at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. They had three children: Laurence, Peter, and Serena.

On October 3, 2018, Fong died in Princeton, New Jersey, of leukemia, aged 88.

Selected publications Streams and Mountains without End: A Northern Sung Handscroll and Its Significance in the History of Early Chinese Painting, co-authored with Sherman E. Lee (Artibus Asiae, 1955; 2nd edition, 1967). The Lohans and a Bridge to Heaven (Freer Gallery of Art, 1958). Summer Mountains: The Timeless Landscape (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975). Returning Home: Tao-chi’s Album of Landscapes and Flowers (George Braziller, 1976). The Great Bronze Age of China: An Exhibition from the People’s Republic of China, editor (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980). Images of the Mind: Selections from the Edward L. Elliot Family and John B. Elliot Collections of Chinese Calligraphy and Painting at the Art Museum, Princeton University (Princeton University Art Museum, 1984). Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 8th–14th Century (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1992). Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei (Metropolitan Museum of Art and H. N. Abrams, 1996). The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliot Collection, co-authored with Robert E. Harrist, Jr., et al. (Princeton University Art Museum, and H. N. Abrams, 1999). Along the Riverbank: Chinese Paintings from the C. C. Wang Family Collection (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999). Between Two Cultures: Late-Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Chinese Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2001).

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