Wu Hung

Wu Hung (; born 1945) is an art historian and Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago. He has also taught at Harvard University and worked as an adjunct faculty curator at the Smart Museum of Art. He currently serves as the director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Wu and his parents moved to Beijing, where his father worked as the Deputy Director of the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and where his mother taught at the Central Academy of Drama.

Career In the year of receiving his doctorate, Wu was hired by the Department of Fine Arts of Harvard as an assistant professor. In 1990, he was appointed as the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. In 2019, he delivered the 68th A. W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art. He also organized many important symposia on topics of Chinese and East Asian art, including Between Han and Tang: Religious Art and Archaeology of a Transformative Period in 1998–2001, Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture in 2006, and the biennial International Conference on Ancient Tomb Art between 2009–2019.

Wu has served as the Adjunct Faculty Curator at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago from 2018 to 2023, and he has also served on the steering committees of art institutions in China including Three Shadows Contemporary Photography Gallery, OCAT Beijing, and the Yuz Museum Shanghai. In a similar vein, his later case studies on individual tombs, such as Mawangdui tomb no. 1, and Buddhist caves, such as Mogao Cave 323, understood the works of art found in these sites within their original context. Noticing the rich archaeological materials from and the unparalleled significance of premodern tombs in China, he proposed in the 2000s the establishment of funerary art as a subfield in the study of Chinese art history and as a subcategory under the broader frame of ritual art. His studies also paid keen attention to the unique visual and spatial logic behind religious artmaking, as exemplified in his study of Buddhist bianxiang (transformation tableaux) paintings at the Mogao Caves, Dunhuang. Recently, he proposed a spatial approach to understand the murals and individual caves of the Mogao Caves as well as the site itself, adding a unique art-historical perspective to the existing archaeological and historical scholarship surrounding this major heritage site.

Throughout his academic inquiry, Wu has been consistently reflecting on the writing of Chinese art history, especially painting history. His monograph, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (1996), was an intentional response to both the Chinese and the Western discourses on painting. His more recent works traced the representation of ruins in Chinese visual culture, considered the large corpus of paintings that represent female subjects, and critically examined the dominant mode of narrating Chinese art under the dynastic frame, all opening up new paths for writing Chinese art history.

More recently, Wu reflected on the studies of global art in a series of lectures and publications. In Ancient Chinese Art in Global Contexts (2017, in Chinese), he defined the unique contributions of traditional Chinese art in the global context from four art forms—ritual vessels, tomb art, handscroll, and shanshui landscape paintings. The Full-Length Mirror: A Global Visual History (2022) is another significant work among others that uses full-length mirror as a point of entry to tell a new kind of global art history.

Alongside his scholarship on ancient and premodern art, Wu Hung maintained a strong interest in the art of his own time and a commitment to expanding research on Chinese art from the contemporary period.

The 1999 exhibition Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago featured a catalogue of case studies on the twenty-two artists exhibited in the show. The exhibition explored several key themes such as ruins, memory, self-representation, urban space, and temporality that would be central to Wu’s understanding of contemporary Chinese art. The following year Wu curated the exhibition Cancelled: Exhibiting Experimental Art in China also at the Smart Museum. The show examined the landscape of exhibition-making in contemporary China, including the existing infrastructure of venues and methods of exhibiting contemporary art, and highlighted twelve innovative exhibitions that experimented artistically with the conventions of an art exhibition. The published catalogue featured translated archival materials and interviews with artists and curators. Other major research-based exhibitions include Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese art: 1990-2000 (2002); RongRong & inri: Tui-Transfiguration (2003); Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (2004); Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art (2008); The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China (2019). The latter served as a companion volume to Contemporary Chinese Art: A History (2014), a survey-length historical overview of contemporary Chinese art outlining Wu’s broad approach to the study of this subfield.

Selected honors and awards

College Art Association 2022 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art, 2022 Harvard University Honorary Doctorate Degree in Arts, 2019 A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, National Gallery, 2019 College Art Association distinguished scholar, 2018 Slade Professorship, University of Oxford, England, 2016 The 2015 Guanghua Distinguished Scholar of Humanities, Fudan University, Shanghai, 2015 Kirk Varnedoe Professorship, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, 2011–2012 Elected member, American Philosophical Society, 2012 Distinguished Teaching Award, College Art Association, 2008 Elected member, American Academy of Art and Science, 2007 Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture is listed as one of “The Best Books of the 1990s” in Artforum, 1999 The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art wins the Joseph Levenson Prize for the best book in Chinese studies (traditional), Association for Asian Studies, 1990

Selected books in English Premodern

The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989 Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995 The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting. London and Chicago: Reaktion Books and University of Chicago Press, 1996 3000 Years of Chinese Painting. New Haven and Beijing: Yale University Press and China Foreign Languages Press, 1997 (co-author) Chinese Sculpture. New Haven and Beijing: Yale University Press and China Foreign Languages Press, 2006 (co-author) Art of the Yellow Spring: Rethinking Chinese Tombs. London and Honolulu: Reaktion Books and Hawaii University Press, 2010 A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture. London and Princeton: Reaktion Books and Princeton University Press, 2012 Space in Art History. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe (bilingual in Chinese and English), 2017 Chinese Art and Dynastic Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022 The Full-length Mirror: A Global Visual History. London: Reaktion Books, 2023 Spatial Dunhuang: Experiencing the Mogao Caves. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023

Modern & contemporary

Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the 20th Century. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 1999 Exhibiting Experimental Art in China. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago, 2000 Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000), The First Guangzhou Triennial. Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art, 2002 (chief editor) Rong Rong’s East Village. New York: Chambers Fine Arts, 2003 Remaking Beijing: Tianmen Square and the Creation of Political Space. London and Chicago: Reaktion Books and University of Chicago Press, 2005 Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2008 Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China. Chicago and New York: Smart Museum of Art and International Center of Photography, 2004 (co-author) Making History: Wu Hung on Contemporary Chinese Art, Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2009 Waste Not: Zhao Xiangyuan and Song Dong. Tokyo: Tokyo Gallery, 2009 (author and editor) Wu Hung on Contemporary Chinese Artists, Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2009 Contemporary Chinese Art: A History. London: Themes & Hudson, 2014 Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents. New York: MoMA publication, 2010 (editor) Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China. London: Reaktion Books, 2016 Allure of the Matter: Material Art from China. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2019 (co-editor)