The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade
Challenging contemporary procedures for establishing attribution, chronology, and authenticity in Chinese art, Winnie Wong explores the means, methods, and stakes of recovering the names of an anonymous community of artists. To examine how Western art history has misconstrued and miscategorized names and identities in Chinese art, she looks to conflicting features of modernity: the European attachment of singular names to individuals and their works, and the Chinese use of socially contingent names that often are not attached to material labor and sometimes operate against it. Wong charts the genealogy of this naming problem by bringing to life the artists of the Qing Empire’s trade with Europeans at the port of Guangzhou, centering on a group of portraitists known by names that were recorded in a pidgin language: Chin Qua, Chit Qua, Spoilum, Lam Qua, and Ting Qua.
Many of these paintings survive today, yet scholars have identified only a handful of the painters’ identities. Pushing against Western norms that have shaped our understanding of authorship, Wong reveals that these artists shared names, created works in multiples, and signed their pieces with different names or none at all. This lavishly illustrated volume explores portraiture across media, including unfired clay, reverse painting on glass, watercolor on paper, oil on canvas, and the daguerreotype, to propose new ways of studying anonymity, copying, and the emergence of author names in the Sino-European visual culture of the long eighteenth century.
Forthcoming November 2025 from The University of Chicago Press
Many of these paintings survive today, yet scholars have identified only a handful of the painters’ identities. Pushing against Western norms that have shaped our understanding of authorship, Wong reveals that these artists shared names, created works in multiples, and signed their pieces with different names or none at all. This lavishly illustrated volume explores portraiture across media, including unfired clay, reverse painting on glass, watercolor on paper, oil on canvas, and the daguerreotype, to propose new ways of studying anonymity, copying, and the emergence of author names in the Sino-European visual culture of the long eighteenth century.
Forthcoming November 2025 from The University of Chicago Press
Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade
Van Gogh on Demand argues that the global contemporary art world is shaped by two powerful ideas: the postmodern assertion of "the death of the author" and the universalist notion that "everybody is an artist." It does so by focusing on an unlikely case of global art production, China's Dafen Oil Painting Village, a flexible production center of eight thousand Chinese painters who produce five million oil paintings per year, sourced from the Western art canon and made for the world's retail and wholesale markets. Based on five years of fieldwork in this transnational trade, this study offers, first and foremost, a comprehensive account of this "readymade" art. Assessing its full theoretical impact, however, its narrative centers on two unique sets of "authors": internationally-active artists who made Dafen village into a source of appropriated paintings and a subject of conceptual art; and the Chinese party-state, which turned Dafen village into a model cultural industry and the subject of extensive propaganda spanning television and the World Expo. In examining the encounter between contemporary artists and the Dafen painters whose labor they appropriate, the study traces critical issues of artistic authorship and assesses their deployment at a site of anonymous production. In examining how this encounter operated within the Chinese government's embrace of creative industries and its attendant production of creative subjects, it offers an account of art practices in a period of cultural shifts heightened by an ascendant China.
Winner of the 2015 Joseph Levenson Book Prize (Association of Asian Studies)
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available in Japanese edition
This multidisciplinary volume, the first of its kind, presents an account of China’s contemporary transformation via one of its most important yet overlooked cities: Shenzhen, located just north of Hong Kong. In recent decades, Shenzhen has transformed from an experimental site for economic reform into a dominant city at the crossroads of the global economy. The first of China’s special economic zones, Shenzhen is today a UNESCO City of Design and the hub of China’s emerging technology industries. Bringing China studies into dialogue with urban studies, the contributors explore how the post-Mao Chinese appropriation of capitalist logic led to a dramatic remodeling of the Chinese city and collective life in China today. These essays show how urban villages and informal institutions enabled social transformation through cases of public health, labor, architecture, gender, politics, education, and more. Offering scholars and general readers alike an unprecedented look at one of the world’s most dynamic metropolises, this collective history uses the urban case study to explore critical problems and possibilities relevant for modern-day China and beyond.
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available in Chinese
Reconsidering the 2006 MIT Visualizing Cultures Controversy: National Histories, Visual Cultures, and Digital Dissentco-edited with Jing Wang
This special issue of positions reflects upon the student protest and public controversy over the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Visualizing Cultures website in 2006 from multiple perspectives. Three sets of questions raised by the incident are addressed by contributors to the volume. The first entails questions over the changing narratives of nationalism and history in Sino-Japanese-US relations, and as taught to and contested by Chinese overseas students. The second revolves around the use and display of visual images in pedagogical, digital, and scholarly contexts, examining debates over authority and interpretation of propagandistic, racist, and violent visual imagery. The third stems from the promises of digital media and examines the challenges of public participation and dissent in the pedagogical sphere. In what ways should or could the norms of scholarship, pedagogy, and student interaction evolve in response to the digital turn, to the globalization of the student body, and to the appropriation of visual technology in the classroom?
winner 2015 Best Special Issue (Council of Editors of Learned Journals)
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Before its current incarnation as the "factory to the world" and one of the densest multi-city clusters in the world, the Pearl River Delta region (PRD) was covered with agricultural villages. These villages are today surrounded by urban development as "villages-in-the-city," and are home to migrants from all over China. Due to their unique legal status acquired over the course of 20th century history, urban villagers are today among the few Chinese citizens who can control their own land, build their own houses, and elect their own leaders. Since 2006, central and municipal government policies have sought to diminish village power, working to eliminate the village as an independent entity in the city. Art, design, and the creative economy has been central to this dynamic between the village and the city, and the "art village" has emerged as a transformative and distinctive urban phenomenon.
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Portability
Globalization is often portrayed as hyper-mobility across spaces of heterogeneity. In this imaginary landscape, unfettered movement, seamless translation and complete reciprocity reign. Such a utopia requires impossibly totalizing and instantaneous objects, things like universal translators and total-information computers. But whether unleashed in reality or in science fiction, mobile objects quickly become encumbered by quotidian problems: enabled with our mobile phones, we obsess about how we might carry them, where we can use them, and why not. "Roaming" frustrates.
issue of Thresholds, 34, 2007
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