Wu Hung

 

Wu Hung currently holds the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professorship at the Department of Art History and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, is the director of the Center for the Art of East Asia, and is the adjunct curator at the Smart Museum. An elected member of the American Academy of Art and Science and awarded with an honorary degree from Harvard University, he sits on many international committees including Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council, and chairs the Academic Committee of the OCAT Museum Group. Wu Hung has received many awards for his publications and academic services, among which he is especially proud of the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching at the University of Chicago (2007), the Distinguished Teaching Award from the College of Art Association (2008), and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the same association.

 

Wu Hung’s research interests include both traditional and contemporary art; he has published many award-winning books and curated many seminal exhibitions in these fields. His interdisciplinary interest has led him to experiment with different ways to integrate these conventionally separate phases into new kinds of art historical narratives.  Examples include his Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture (1995), The Double Screen: Medium and Representation of Chinese Pictorial Art (1996), Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square: the Creation of a Political Space (2005), A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (2012), and Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China (2016). His ongoing projects address the symbiotic relationship between artistic practice and discourse, as well as new narrative modes in writing about global transmissions of visual technology, language, and representational modes. These themes are demonstrated in his two forthcoming books, one based on the 68^th A. W. Mellon Lecture in the Fine Arts which he delivered in the National Gallery, Washington, DC, in 2019, and the other entitled Object · Image · Photography: A Short Global History of the Full-length Mirror.