Title

Core Faculty

Eugene Wang

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art

A native of Jiangsu, China, Eugene Yuejin Wang studied at Fudan University in Shanghai (B.A. 1983; M.A. 1986), and subsequently at Harvard University (A.M. 1990; Ph.D. 1997). He was the Ittleson Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Visual Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1995-96) before joining the art history faculty at the University of Chicago in 1996. His teaching appointment at Harvard University began in 1997, and he became the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art in 2005.

He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and postdoctoral and research grants from the Getty Foundation.

His book, Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (2005) has received the Academic Achievement Award in memory of the late Professor Nichijin Sakamoto, Rissho University, Japan. He is the art history associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism (New York, 2004).

His thirty or so articles published in The Art Bulletin, Art History, Critical Inquiry, Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, Public Culture, and elsewhere, cover a wide range of subjects, including ancient bronze mirrors, Buddhist murals and sculptures, reliquaries, scroll paintings, calligraphy, woodblock prints, architecture, photography, and films. He has also translated Roland Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux into Chinese, and wrote the screenplay for a short film, Stony Touch, selected for screening in the 9th Hawaii International Film Festival.

Selected Publications

• Books
• 

  Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. Received Academic Achievement Award from Japan. Introduction (PDF); reviews.



• 

  Anshang fang: kou, wenzi, he tuxiang 庵上坊: 口述, 文字, 圖像 (The Archway at Anshang: Orality, Texts, and Images). Co-author with Zheng Yan. Beijing: Sanlian chubanshe, 2008.



• 

  Fragments d'un discours amoureux 戀人絮語.
  By Roland Barthes, trans. Eugene Wang. With Wu Peirong.
  Shanghai: Remin Press, 1988; Taipei: Donghai Press, 1989.



• Articles. (for a full list, see curriculum vitae.)
• "Elitism vs. Populism." in "The Chinese Language, Ever Evolving." The New York Times. 2 May 2008.

• 

  "'Picture Idea' and Its Cultural Dynamics in Northern Song China." The Art Bulletin. LXXXIX, no. 3 (2007): 463-81. (10 MB)

• "Patterns Above and Within: The Picture of the Turning Sphere and Medieval Chinese Astral Imagination." In Book by Numbers, edited by Wilt Idema, 49-89. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007.

• 

  "Crystallizing the 'Bleary Blur': Bronze Mat Weights and the Emergence of New Plastic Thinking in Western Han Dynasty." In A Bronze Menagerie: Mat Weights of Early China, 64-74. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2006. (1 MB)

• 

  "Mirror, Moon, and Memory in Eighth Century China: From Coiling Dragon to Lunar Landscape." In Clarity and Luster: New Light on Bronze Mirrors in Tang and Post-Tang Dynasty China, 600-1300, edited by Claudia Brown and Ju-hsi Chou, 42-67. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art in Association with Brepols Publishers, 2005. Special issue of Cleveland Studies in the History of Art. Vol. 9, 2005. (8 MB)

• 

  "Of the True Body: The Buddha's Relics and Corporeal Transformation in Tang Imperial Culture." In Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture, edited by Wu Hung and Katherine T. Mino. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. (26 MB)

• 

  "Oneiric Horizons and Dissolving Bodies: Buddhist Cave Shrine as Mirror Hall." In Art History 27, no. 4 (2004): 494-521. Special issue on Visual Culture. (4 MB)

• "Sketch Conceptualism as Modernist Contingency." In Chinese Art: Modern Expressions, edited by Maxwell Hearn and Judith Smith: 102-61. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001.

• 

  "The Winking Owl: An Art Historical Thick Description."
  Critical Inquiry 26 (Spring 2000): 435-73. (5 MB)

• "What Do Trigrams Have to Do with Buddhas? The Northern Liang (397-439) Stupas as a Hybrid Spatial Model."
  RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. 35 (Spring 1999): 71-91.

• "The Taming of the Shrew: Wang Hsi-Chih (303-361) and Calligraphic Gentrification in Seventh-century China" in Character and Context, edited by Cary Liu et al., 132-73. Princeton Art Museum, 1999.

• 

  "Mirror, Death, and Rhetoric–Reading Later Han Chinese Bronze Artifacts." The Art Bulletin. VLXXVI, no. 3 (1994): 511-34. (8 MB)