About

As a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University in History of Art and Architecture, I focus on Chinese art from modern and cross-cultural perspectives. I have also completed a subfield in Japanese visual culture of the Edo period (1615-1868). My interests include the history of Chinese painting from ancient through contemporary, High Qing (1661-1799) visual culture, photography at the Chinese imperial court during the early twentieth century, and East Asian visual culture produced between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in response to European art and technology.

My dissertation, The Emperor’s Perspective: Picturing the Emperor Qianlong’s (r. 1736-1795) Inner Landscape, examines the illusionistic Chinese court paintings created with European trompe-l’oeil techniques that not only reveal the Emperor’s private world, but also exemplify the new visuality of late imperial China that was inspired by Sino-European interaction. To read more, please download my dissertation abstract.

The only complete group of these paintings is found in Emperor Qianlong’s Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Service within the Forbidden City. This site can be visited virtually in a 360-degree panorama created before its restoration, and in a slide show composed after the restoration was formally completed in 2008. A tour of the restored Studio can also be viewed in the video below:

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.