Biography
Shasha Liu is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the rank of Instructor at the Center for the Art of East Asia (CAEA), in conjunction with the Department of Art History, at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on modern Chinese art and visual culture, with particular interests in Dunhuang, photography, exhibition history, and animation. Her work examines how practices and technologies of reproduction and visual mediation shape the circulation, interpretation, and historical understanding of Chinese art across transnational and Cold War contexts. At CAEA, Liu contributes to the Dispersed Chinese Art Digitization Project (DCADP), bringing her research into dialogue with the Center’s curatorial and digital humanities initiatives.
Liu received her PhD from the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Supported by a 2026–27 Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Flexible Early Career Fellowship in China Studies, she is currently developing her first book manuscript, tentatively titled Dunhuang as Method: Media, Knowledge, and the Making of Modern Cultural Heritage. The project examines how photography, mural copying, exhibitions, cinema, and digital technologies have shaped modern understandings of Dunhuang across China, Taiwan, Japan, and Eastern Europe. By tracing Dunhuang across different media and sites of circulation, the project considers how the reproduction and mediation of premodern art became integral to the making of modern cultural heritage and knowledge.
Publications:
Liu, Shasha. “Adapting Dunhuang in a Transitional Period: Negotiated Intermediality in the Deer of Nine Colours and Jiazi Saves the Deer,” in Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion, edited by Daisy Yan Du, John A. Crespi, Yiman Wang, Harvard University Press (Asia Center), 2025. 103-123.
Liu, Shasha. “Zooming in on the animated background: Mediated Dunhuang murals with design in the Conceited General,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 15 no.1 (2021): 22-38.