2026 Workshop Participants

Shangyi Lyu is a first-year PhD student in East Asian art history at the University of Kansas. Her research interests include premodern Chinese material culture, painting and calligraphy, medieval Zen Buddhist art in the context of Sino-Japanese artistic exchange, and visual culture in Edo Japan. Her current research focuses on Chinese visual culture from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, especially the entanglement of political and military anxieties with the environment and material culture.

Lucia Wang is a Ph.D. student in History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture at University of Alberta. Her research focuses on contemporary Chinese calligraphy in the context of performance art. She is interested in how artists transform the theoretical mind-body relationship into physical action and use nontraditional media to question conventions of legibility, gender, and cultural authority.

Shao-chun Wang is a PhD student in Art History at UCLA. Her research focuses on literati culture and animal history, particularly Song dynasty painting and Neo-Confucianism. She holds an MA from National Taiwan University in Shang dynasty art history and archaeology and previously worked at the National Palace Museum in Taipei.

Gengwei Guo is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at Indiana University Bloomington. He holds both a B.A. and an M.F.A. in Chinese painting from Nanjing University of the Arts, as well as an M.A. in Art History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on Ming and Qing dynasty bird-and-flower painting, Qing material culture, and women artists of the Qing period, with broader interests in visual culture and artistic practice.

Filippo Grassi is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland. He holds a BA and an MA in Chinese language and culture from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research examines issues of modernity, tradition, and identity in modern and contemporary art from the Greater China region, with a focus on postwar painting in Taiwan. Filippo is also interested in Digital Humanities and works on projects that integrate digital media with art-historical research and pedagogy.

Aria Diao is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on Chinese narrative and figural painting in the post-Song era, with a particular interest in the format of handscroll and how its materiality conditions and activates the narrative reading of images. She is currently a curatorial intern in Asian Art at the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas.

Jianda (Dada) Wang is a PhD candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on 20th-century Chinese art, with particular attention to the framings of modernity articulated through visual culture. Her dissertation examines how the capacity for emotional experience and expression came to constitute a central component of the aesthetics of modernity within shifting discourses on the modern subject throughout the 20th century.

Jing Wang is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Edinburgh. Her doctoral research focuses on twentieth-century Chinese calligraphy. She is currently working on a book chapter on maritime calligraphic exchanges during the Qing dynasty.

Yuchen Wang is a doctoral student in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, specializing in East Asian art. Yuchen’s research focuses on painting and printmaking in Ming and Qing China, with broader interests in book history, material culture, and literary studies—both within and beyond the East Asian context.

Yixin (Star) Song is a Ph.D. student from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor’s Art History PhD program. His research concerns the history of Chinese landscape painting from the Song to the Yuan dynasties. His other interests include the history of modern architecture, Qing dynasty calligraphy, and critical theories. Star holds a B.A. in Art History with a minor in Cognitive Science from Carleton College and a M.A. in Art History from Bryn Mawr College.

Melody Hsu is a PhD candidate in Art History at McGill University and holds an MA from the University of Amsterdam. Her study is supported by the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowships. She likes to investigate the (re/un)making and exchange of visual and material culture between the Low Countries and East Asia from the 16th to 18th century; as well as broader transcultural and transmedial movements of objects between Early Modern European and Late Imperial Chinese Worlds.

Kyra is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on Chinese funerary art and architecture, and how material objects acquire new meanings over time. She has worked on wall paintings in Shanxi monasteries and Northern Dynasties religious steles. In this workshop, she hopes to further explore how religious images and inscribed objects function within social and ritual contexts through their materiality and production.

Andrew Nguy explores how émigré monks adapted Chinese Buddhist liturgies for new audiences in new regions, particularly Japan and Vietnam after the fall of the Ming in 1368. His previous work examined ritual performance as mode of Buddhist pedagogy. He is an avid translator of Buddhist texts and is currently pursuing a PhD in Religion at Princeton University.

Yuqing Tao is an art historian and archaeologist. He is currently pursuing his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in the department of History of Art and Architecture. His main research focus is Chinese cave temples, especially small and later cave temples. He is also a professional field archaeologist and conservationist, having participated in numerous excavation projects, and author of more than a dozen publications.

Qinlin Li is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, studying East Asian art and architecture. Her research focuses on the material and visual culture of pre-modern China.

Benet Ge is a PhD student in the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University studying eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art in Britain, the British empire, and China. He has previously worked in curatorial departments at the National Gallery of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Clark Art Institute, and Whitney Museum of American Art.

Hao Wu is a PhD student in Art History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She studies premodern Buddhist art, with an interest in the question of what makes a temple a temple. She is interested in exploring how the visual program, architectural layout and materiality of a temple collectively shape the embodied sensory experience of Buddhist practitioners.

Yu-Yu Cheng is a rising second-year Ph.D. student in Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, specializing in East Asian art history. Her research focuses on late imperial Chinese visual and material culture, with particular interests in transmedial circulation of images and world-building. Before joining Princeton, she received her B.A. in Archaeology from Nanjing University and her M.A. in Chinese Studies from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

Dehlia is a PhD student in art history focusing on Chinese material culture. Her research interests are in textiles, gender, and craft in late imperial China. Specifically, her research focuses on embroidery needles and related tools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and on the impact of industrial made tools imported from Europe and the United States. Dehlia spent the last year at IUP Tsinghua as a Blakemore fellow.

Emma Laube is a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, San Diego. She holds a BA in Art History and East Asian Studies from Oberlin College and an MA in History of Art from The Ohio State University. In her research, Emma studies the reproduction of the devotional and auspicious iconography of popular prints in advertisements during China’s Republican (1911-1949) period.