Awards
2008 Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Wu Hung, University of Chicago
Wu Hung
CAA is pleased to honor Wu Hung with the 2008 Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Wu is Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Art History and Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1995. This follows more than three decades in Beijing, including work at the National Palace Museum and then at Harvard University. His combination of rigorous, generous, and innovative teaching and prolific and exemplary scholarship has inspired a generation of scholars, transforming the study of East Asian art. Teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses, he mentors as many as fifteen graduate students at a time. Most striking has been his dexterous combination of the roles of teacher, scholar, and curator. He has also played a crucial role in his original field of premodern Chinese art, as well as in the development of scholarship on and the exhibition of contemporary Chinese art. His work has brought to students, scholars, and publics around the world an awareness of one another’s art and culture, both ancient and contemporary—an effort important for its contribution to the field and to our wider society.
Wu’s service to the field is extensive. He serves the University of Chicago as director of the Center for the Art of East Asia, consulting curator for the Smart Museum of Art, and organizer of the annual Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia workshop. He is chair of the Artistic Board of the He Xiangniang Museum and OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in Shenzhen, China, and is a member of the Museum Advisory Committee of the Asia Society in New York. Wu is a model of the scholar-teacher as exemplary citizen: over the years he has served on numerous fellowship committees, including those for the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS); on visiting and review committees for the universities of Taiwan and Hong Kong; and on the editorial and advisory boards of several journals, including The Art Bulletin. He has received Guggenheim, ACLS, and Ford Foundation fellowships. His publications as author, coauthor, and editor on the art of premodern China and contemporary Chinese art are legion, and many have been awarded prizes: the Haskin Award from the Association of American Publishers was given in 1998 to Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, which he coauthored. Students and colleagues alike find new directions in their own work in his evolving scholarship, for example, in his 2005 book Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space.
But it is above all for his extraordinary teaching that this award is given—teaching that earned him the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching at the University of Chicago last year. Wu combines an expectation of scholarly rigor with an ability to inspire students with the joy of intellectual discovery and historical investigation. His teaching, a writer remarks, is “pedagogically brilliant in cultivating the creativity and individuality of each of his students.” He stresses both the traditional and the new in education, requiring students to understand fully the value of interdisciplinarity in academic and nonacademic contexts.
Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (2005)
All these values are clear in his teaching of premodern Chinese art. But his embrace of modern and contemporary Chinese art has been instrumental in bringing it to the attention of scholars and general audiences in the West, particularly the United States. His publications on artists such as Wenda Gu and on Chinese photographers have been essential to the emergence of this subject and to the development of a new generation of historians working on it. In a sense his work has created a new field in the teaching of art history in the US. His goal, as many note, is to expand the horizons of his students, both those focusing on East Asian art and those whose work in rooted in the Western tradition. A colleague writes, “His own broad-reaching seminars have proved just as rewarding to students in the Western program as to those in East Asian…. There is no cookie-cutter Wu Hung–style dissertation or BA paper. The projects are as diverse as the students who come into the program.”
In graduate seminars such as “Chinese Scroll Painting” and “Ruins in Chinese Art,” and in large lecture classes designed for both graduate and undergraduates such as “Feminine Space” and “Arts of China,” he maintains remarkable intellectual complexity and excitement. Students comment on the breadth of his intellectual curiosity and the degree to which he encourages them to explore their interests, so that at times they bring new fields to his attention. They also commend his use of new analytical methodologies and technologies, from presentation software to his development of a five-person graduate-student team for the Digital Scrolling Paintings project, which allows viewers to view scroll paintings as long, continuous images.
Wu’s innovative scholarship is matched by the innovative use of technology. But his students and colleagues make it clear that his greatest influence lies in the atmosphere that he creates through his encouragement of graduate students: he expects that while he mentors them they will mentor each other and the next generation of students, guaranteeing the continuation of a generous, exciting intellectual community.
Jury: Rebecca Corrie, Bates College, chair; Eva Hoffman, Tufts University; Barbara Jaffee, Northern Illinois University; and Carol Purtle, University of Memphis.
