Art History 101: Asian Art in the Collection

The CMA Collection consists of four main collecting areas: modern and contemporary, European, Asian, and American art. While the collection galleries are temporarily closed for an exciting revamp, visitors are invited to explore these categories in Art History 101, a casual lecture series. This time, dive into Asian works in the CMA Collection with art historian and educator Dr. Amanda Wangwright.

Sign up for the full series of four classes or one class at a time. Today’s class focuses on early modern Japanese art and the global art world.

Asian Art Series: $80 / $64 for members. Single class: $25 / $20 for members. Join today!

Series:

Members Registration

Public Registration

Single Class

Members Registration

Public Registration

Weekly Topics: 

September 8 — Chinese Funerary Art: Creating Underground Palaces for the Afterlife

September 29 — Buddhist Art and Architecture: Buddhas, Pagodas, and Karmic Merit

October 6 — Mid-Autumn Festival and the Chinese Calligraphic Tradition (includes a mooncake and tea sampling and a hands-on calligraphy activity)

October 20 — Early Modern Japanese Art and the Global Art World

Amanda Wangwright is an associate professor in the School of Visual Art and Design at the University of South Carolina. She has published on a range of topics in 20th-century Chinese art, including transnational patronage, modernism, and feminism. Her research has been supported by the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies in Kyoto, Japan, and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation. Her first book, The Golden Key: Modern Women Artists and Gender Negotiations in Republican China (1911-1949), won an SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication in 2021. Wangwright is currently working on a book on modern art in wartime China, ca. 1937–1949, and coediting a collection of essays on 20th-century transpacific cultural exchange.
 

Current research projects include a monograph on the modern art of wartime China (c. 1937–1949), which explores the factionalism and fanaticism of wartime China's art community and addresses topics such as the anxiety of national erasure as pictured in romanticized depictions of the minorities of the Chinese interior, artist-led campaigns soliciting wartime support from international audiences, and the collaborative art activism of the anti-Japanese resistance movement. An additional research project focuses on the portrayal of artists in popular culture and the modern professionalization of art in in early 20th-century China. A separate line of research analyzes Republican-period depictions of the male nude in natural landscapes in connection with shifting perspectives of modern masculinity.