Cheng-hua Wang

Position
Associate Professor of Art and Archaeology
Office Phone
Office
2N-11 Green Hall
Bio/Description

Profile

Cheng-hua Wang, a specialist in Chinese painting and visual culture, joined the department in 2016 as associate professor. She was previously Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taipei. She earned her B.A. (1985) in history and M.A. (1989) in Chinese art history both from National Taiwan University. She received her Ph.D. in Chinese art history from Yale University (1998).

Wang has published widely in both Chinese and English. Her publications in Chinese are collected in the volume titled Art, Power, and Consumption: One Perspective on the History of Chinese Art (2011). Her English-language publications appear in the journals The Art BulletinArtibus Asiae, Orientations, and Nan Nü: Men, Women, and Gender in Early and Imperial China. She has twice participated in field-wide discussions on art history published in The Art Bulletin (2007 and 2014), addressing critical issues and trends that cut across international boundaries. She has also contributed to a number of edited volumes including Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual CultureThe Role of Japan in Modern Chinese ArtA Companion to Asian Art and ArchitectureFace to Face: The Transcendence of the Arts in China and Beyond; and The Lost Generation: Luo Zhenyu, Qing Loyalists and the Formation of Modern Chinese Culture.

As a member of the community of art history and East Asian studies at Princeton, she will devote herself to introducing undergraduates to the complexities and richness of Chinese art and to training graduate students in Chinese art, especially Chinese painting and calligraphy as well as print and exhibition culture. A special focus will be on the field of Chinese scroll paintings, because it deserves greater attention now since it has lagged behind other fields of Chinese art, such as tomb and cave art, which came in vogue in the late 1990s. She also plans to collaborate with the Art Museum to organize exhibitions and publish important catalogs on Chinese art and to contribute to the projects and activities initiated by the Tang Center for East Asian Art. 

Current Research

Professor Wang is currently working on two book projects. The first focuses on the painting theme Qingming shanghe (Up the River during Qingming Days), tackling issues regarding the construction of a painting history through thematic links, the complicated relationship between a primordial artwork and its later derivatives, and the rise of city views in late sixteenth-century China. The second investigates the city views of eighteenth-century China; major issues include power and landscape painting, the construction of local identity through landscape, and the use and appropriation of European stylistic elements in Chinese landscapes. In the future, she will continue her work on traditional Chinese painting, with an emphasis on their materiality. She will also turn her publications on exhibition culture and heritage preservation in early twentieth-century China into a book, focused on the Forbidden City and the history of the Palace Museum.

Education

Ph.D., Yale University, 1998

Selected Publications

December 2014, “A Global Perspective on Eighteenth Century Chinese Art and Visual Culture,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 96, no. 4, pp. 379–94.

December 2012, “Going Public: Portraits of the Empress Dowager Cixi, Circa 1904,” in Nan Nü: Men, Women, and Gender in Early and Imperial China, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 119–76.

December 2011, “Rediscovering Song Painting for the Nation: Artistic Discursive Practices in Early Twentieth Century China,” Artibus Asiae, vol. LXXI, no. 2, pp. 221–46.

2013, “New Printing Technology and Heritage Preservation: Collotype Reproduction of Antiquities in Modern China, Circa 1908-1917,” in Joshua Fogel, ed., The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), pp. 273–308 and 363–72.

2013, “Luo Zhenyu and the Formation of Qiwu (Antiquities) and Qiwuxue (the Studies of Antiquities) in the First Decade of the Republican Era,” in Yang Chia-ling and Roderick Whitfield, eds., Lost Generation: Luo Zhenyu, Qing Loyalists and the Formation of Modern Chinese Culture (London: EAP in conjunction with the Department of History of Art, University of Edinburgh, 2013), pp. 32–57.

2010, “The Qing Imperial Collection, Circa 1905–25: National Humiliation, Heritage Preservation, and Exhibition Culture,” in Wu Hung, ed., Reinventing the Past: Archaism and Antiquarianism in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Chicago: CAEA, University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 320–41.

Field(s)
Chinese Art
Home Department and Other Affiliations
Art & Archaeology
East Asian Studies Program