Center for the Art of East Asia

The Wu Hung Archive is a research initiative launched by the Center for the Art of East Asia (CAEA) in collaboration with the Visual Resources Center (VRC) at the University of Chicago. This archive brings together several interconnected digital repositories: the Wu Hung 35mm Slide Archive of Chinese Buddhist Sites, the Wu Hung Contemporary Chinese Video Art Archive, and the Smart Museum of Art Exhibition Archive. This project underscores CAEA’s pivotal role in shaping the study, interpretation, and exhibition of Chinese art across historical periods, from antiquity to the present.

Together, these collections trace a set of intellectual and curatorial trajectories that have redefined global understandings of Chinese art over the past several decades. Spanning materials from Buddhist cave sites and temple complexes to experimental video practices and field-defining exhibitions, the archive reflects the breadth of Wu Hung’s scholarly and curatorial work. The 35mm slide archive documents field-based research conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, preserving visual records of significant cultural heritage sites. The video archive captures the emergence of contemporary Chinese art through rare analogue recordings of performance, exhibition documentation, and early video works from the 1990s and early 2000s. Complementing these, the Smart Museum Exhibition Archive provides institutional context, illuminating how exhibitions at the University of Chicago have shaped the historiography and global reception of Chinese art.

As an open and evolving platform, the Wu Hung Archive serves not only as a depository of primary materials, but also as a dynamic infrastructure for research, teaching, and curatorial experimentation. By activating these collections within the classroom, exhibition space, and digital environment, the Wu Hung Archive positions the University of Chicago as a central site for rethinking Chinese art history as deeply historical, critically engaged, and globally connected.

Part of the upcoming UChicago Node project, the Wu Hung Archive currently indexes around 300 published papers with plans to add ephemera and other materials in the near future.

The Wu Hung 35mm Slide Archive of Chinese Buddhist Sites contains a selection of more than 1,000 images from Professor Wu Hung’s expansive personal slide archive documenting sites such as Qinghai, Dazu, Shangxi, Yungang Grottoes, Linxian, and more. 

The slides were photographed by Professor Wu during the 1970s and 1980s. Doctoral students at the University of Chicago working on underpublished Buddhist sites found their professor’s own archive to be an important source of image documentation for their research, and we are pleased to make these images available to a wider community through this collection. 

Thank you to the Center for East Asian Studies for their support and collaboration. Many thanks to project catalogers Yiwen Wu, Danni Huang, Jiahe Wang, and Yunyi Xing. View the collection here. 

Through his work with contemporary artists, Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and the College, has developed a collection of rare contemporary Chinese art documents saved in their original analog VHS format. These VHS tapes include both seldom and never before seen documents of performance art from the 1990s, exhibition views from groundbreaking exhibitions staged throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as works of early contemporary video art.

In August 2022, Dr. Ellen Larson conducted the initial inventory and cataloging of Professor Wu Hung’s video archive and taught with several of these video materials in her Autumn 2022 iteration of the course, “Approaches to Contemporary Chinese Art.” With support from the Center for East Asian Studies, the VHS tapes were digitized by Media Burn Archive.During Summer 2023, Jiahe Wang, a fourth-year College student majoring in Art History and Economics, worked with Dr. Larson and VRC staff to research and create robust, bilingual metadata records for the collection in LUNA. Students in Dr. Larson’s Autumn 2023 iteration of the course, “Approaches to Contemporary Chinese Art,” utilized the newly digitized and described archive as part of their research for the course’s curatorial and scholarly project,  Ephemeral Architectures: Early Video and Performance from China. View the collection here. 

The Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago is a site for rigorous inquiry and exchange that encourages the examination of complex issues through the lens of art objects and artistic practice. The Smart’s commitment to incorporating diverse ideas, identities, and experiences into its exhibitions and collections extends throughout its history.

The Smart Museum Exhibition Archive seeks to shed light on the Smart’s extensive exhibition program dating back to its dedication as the Smart Gallery in 1974. Previously only accessible to museum staff, the digitization and description of these exhibition files opens up new opportunities to take a deep dive into the archives and supports the interests and research of faculty, instructors, students, and the campus community.

In February 1999, Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Chinese Art History at the university, opened his first exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art. Entitled Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (1999),  the exhibition – and many more Wu curated in the ensuing years – was field-defining and forged new avenues for situating Chinese art within a broader global contemporary framework.

This collection requires a CNetID and password to login. Access the collection here to view the exhibition archives for the following Smart exhibitions curated by Wu: 

• Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (1999)
• Canceled: Exhibiting Experimental Art in China (2000)
• The Art of Mu Xin: Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes (2002)
• Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (2004)
• Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art (2008)
• Allure of Matter (various iterations/locations) (2020)
• Porcelain: Material and Storytelling (2022)