Art History

Jaebin Yoo is a Ph. D. candidate in Art History at Seoul National University, Korea. She received her B.A. and M.A. from Seoul National University and has been a lecturer teaching Korean Art History for the last five years. She is currently working on her dissertation, "Court-Sponsored Paintings from the Era of King Jeongjo (r.1776-1800)," in which she examines how King Jeongjo promoted paintings and prints to advance his own political aims and improve the image of the ruler. In particular, she hopes to illuminate the environment in which court art was worshipped, discussed, and distributed by placing these practices in their ritual, political, and bibliographical contexts. At HYI, she will focus on the increasing use of illustrated prints in official publications under Jeongjo’s order, and investigate his strategy of visualizing knowledge in relation to illustrated prints and encyclopedias that were officially imported from Qing China. 

Wu Xueshan received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Department of Art History, Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is currently Associate Professor at Minzu University of China. His research interests lie in Chinese art history. He has published Collection of Wu Xueshan’s studies of Chinese Art History (Beijing: China Minzu University Press, 2009) and Zhang Zeduan’s Qingming Shanghe Tu (Beijing: Cultural Relics Press, 2009).

Hongfeng Tang received her B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from Beijing Normal University. She graduated in 2009 and now works at the Chinese National Academy of Arts as an assistant researcher. She was a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto from 2007-2008. Her research interests focus on 20th-century China, especially late Qing and early Republican Chinese literature, visual culture and intellectual history. She is also interested in contemporary Chinese intellectual debates and Chinese-language cinema. She recently published the book Traveling Modernity: Studies on Travel Narrative in Late Qing Novels (Lvxing de Xiandaixing: Wan Qing Xiaoshuo Lvxing Xushi Yanjiu) ( Beijing Normal University Press, 2011). She is currently working on a project on Late Qing and Early Republican Chinese Visual Culture Studies, sponsored by the Chinese National Philosophy and Social Science Fellowship Office. She is also participating in a project on late Qing and early Republican Chinese literary thought.

Cai Tao is a Ph. D. candidate in the Department of Art History at the China Art Academy. His current research interest focuses on modern Chinese art movements of the 1930s and the Sino-Japanese relationship. As a curator at the Guangdong Museum of Art (GDMoA) since 1997, he has organized a series of exhibitions on modern Chinese artists who studied in Japan. In November 2007, he curated an exhibition on “Floating Avant-Garde: The Chinese Independent Art Society (Zhonghua Duli Meishu Xiehui), and Modern Art in Guangzhou, Shanghai and Tokyo in 1930s”  held at GDMoA. He now works as Associate Research Fellow at the Guangzhou Fine Art Academy.

Current Research Projects and Interests: Dr. Lee's research interests include women painters in the Ming and Qing dynasties as well as Chinese gardens and garden culture

Soojin Kim is a Lecturer and a Ph. D. Candidate at the Department of Archeology and Art History, Seoul National University, Korea. She has been participating in a project entitled "A Publishing and Digitalizing Korean Biographical Dictionary of Calligraphers and Painters of Korea" organized by the National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage. Since receiving her M.A. degree with a thesis on the eighteenth century Korean court painter KIM Hee-song (金喜誠) who gained fame for record paintings to propagate political achievements of Yong-jo (英祖: r.1724-1776), she has published articles on court-patronized art in the second half of the Choson Dynasty, including the period of the Great Han Empire (大韓帝國: 1897-1910). Her academic interests include the following issues: How court paintings visualize the authority and the ruler-ship of royal patrons, how characteristics of court style and iconography were constructed, and how court paintings were used strategically as means of self-fashioning and propaganda. She is currently doing research on the tradition of Japanese academic paintings while working on her subject "Court Painting and Patronage in the period of the Great Han Empire".

IDO Misato received her PhD from the Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies Department, University of Tokyo. Her doctoral dissertation focused on Japanese medieval folding screens, investigating how people perceived visualized images (such as landscapes) and placing such perceptions in social, historical and political contexts in order to examine how images functioned for the viewer or commissioner. Her academic interests include the space in which artwork is utilized, that is, the arena of religious rituals or space for performing arts such as the tea ceremony and Noh theater. Furthermore, since artwork in medieval Japan cannot be researched without reference to China and Korea, she researches the folding screen from the perspective of the larger East Asian context, making note of the reciprocal relationship between landscape and rituals. Dr. Ido is currently an assistant professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, the University of Tokyo.

Wang Yuan graduated from Tongji University with her Ph. D in Architectural History in 2000 and currently is an associate professor in the Department of History, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. At present, her research interests are in architectural social history. Through a village case study in southern China, Yuan introduces anthropological and historical research methods to her study of vernacular architecture and uses multi-dimensional observation and analysis to strengthen the explanation for the architecture.