University of Chicago, Director, Center for the Art of East Asia, painter and scholar of contemporary Chinese painting

• Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, East Asian
• Languages & Civilizations, and the College
• Director, Center for the Art of East Asia
• Consulting Curator, Smart Museum of Art

Biography

Wu Hung specializes in early Chinese art, from the earliest years to the Cultural Revolution. His special research interests include relationships between visual forms (architecture, bronze vessels, pictorial carvings and murals, etc.) and ritual, social memory and political discourses. Also the consulting curator for the Smart Museum of Art, Hung is the author of Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (University Of Chicago Press, 1999), Monumentality in Early Chinese Art (Stanford University Press, 1995), Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting (Yale University Press, 1997), and the forthcoming Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space. Hung grew up in Beijing and studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. From 1973 to 1978 he served on the research staff at the Palace Museum, located inside Beijing's Forbidden City. He came to Chicago in 1994.