Center for the Art of East Asia

For fifteen years, researchers from Peking University under the supervision of LaoZhu (朱青生) have focused on collecting data of domestic art scene such as exhibits and public events and archiving interviews, critiques, and other scholarly publications in Chinese, while members of the CAEA community under the supervision of Prof. Wu Hung have been in charge of the material outside China and sources in languages other than Chinese. Drawing information from magazines, journals, homepages of major museums and galleries, personal websites of artists and curators, or even via informal sources such as social media accounts and word of mouth, the yearbook series thrives on this collaboration and has grown into a 13-volume series with two more soon forthcoming. Since 2015, an annual exhibition (中国当代艺术年鉴展) has been held in China to feature some of the key artists and their recent works, reflecting recent trends and topics in the contemporary art world. Together, these data-driven efforts constructed a framework and a substantial network through which researchers, curators, critics, and artists can further develop their own analyses and discourses.

Current Contributors

Members from the CAEA community - mostly doctoral students in the Department of Art History including Peggy Wang, Christina Yu Yu, Stephanie Su, Anne Feng, Xi Zhang, and Zhiyan Yang - have contributed to the program. Current project members include Zhiyan Yang, Li Jiang, Yan Jin, Lucien Le Sun.

Zhiyan Yang is a doctoral candidate specializing in the history of modern and contemporary East Asian Architecture. He is currently writing a dissertation on post-socialist architecture in China and its various cultural applications and reflections, including exhibits, journals, history writing and its intersection with contemporary visual culture and art. He received his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 2013 and M.A. from the University of Chicago in 2015. Zhiyan has been a researcher and overseas liaison of the Contemporary Chinese Art Yearbook Project spearheaded by Peking University and the University of Chicago since 2015. He has also previously interned at Xu Bing Studio in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Li Jiang is a PhD student of East Asian art history, focusing primarily on funerary art in ancient and early medieval China. Li Jiang received her MA from the University of Chicago in 2018. Her thesis examined the fragments of a lacquer screen from an elite burial of the Northern Wei dynasty. Her current research involves the material cultural and inter-regional issues in northeast Asian tomb arts from the fourth to seventh centuries.

Le Lucien Sun is a PhD student in East Asian visual and material culture. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Fudan University, Shanghai. During his BA, he spent an academic year at the University of Tokyo exploring Japanese collections of Chinese and East Asian art. His recent paper focused on images of filial piety stories at tombs in north China during the Yuan period. His current research interests lie broadly in Chinese burial art from the tenth to seventeenth century. He has also become interested in the exchange of visual and material culture on the Eurasia continent under Mongolian rule.

Yan Jin is a PhD student in East Asian art history, focusing on material culture of late imperial China. Her research interests include cross-regional exchanges, negotiation between global and local artistic traditions, objects and agency. Yan received her BA in Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2018) and her MA from the University of Chicago (2019) with a thesis on glass mirror table screens in Qianlong’s court.