Jennifer Purtle（裴珍妮）
My research focuses principally on Chinese painting and visual culture. My methodological interests are, on the one hand, in artistic geographies and artistic mobility - that, how, and why artists and objects move, and what happens when they do - and on the other in methodological approaches to Chinese art history that permit the history of objects in China to be seen on their own terms, outside the epistemological confines of the discipline of art history that are tacitly and insidiously "Western." Beginning in the 1990s, much of my work has been grounded in archival and field work China's Fujian province. In a major, revisionist book, Peripheral Vision: Fujian Paintings in Chinese Empires, 909-1646, I explore the production of paintings in, and by natives of Fujian, as well as their circulation in a succession of Chinese empires. I am currently midway through a new project, "Forms of Cosmopolitanism in the Sino-Mongol City," which connects Fujian and other places in China to many other parts of the medieval world. My interests are not limited to Fujian, but Fujian has proven to be a fruitful site for new inquiry into the history of Chinese art.
Recently I completed serving as Principal Investigator of the Getty Foundation Connecting Art Histories Project "Global and Postglobal Perspectives on Medieval Art and Art History;" I have also been the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art (USA) and a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute among other major awards. My publications include: Reading Revolution: Art and Literacy during China's Cultural Revolution (Coach House Books, 2016) and Looking Modern: East Asian Visual Culture from the Treaty Ports to World War II (University of Chicago Press, 2009). My articles and essays have appeared in Art History, Journal of Asian Studies, Medieval Encounters, Orientations, and other journals, as well as in volumes edited by James Elkins, Thomas daCosta Kaufmann, Jerome Silbergeld, Eugene Wang, Wu Hung, and others. I have presented papers at four CIHA congresses (2000, London; 2004, Montreal; 2008, Melbourne; 2016 Beijing) among other venues.
Prospective PhD students should have formal training in Chinese art history or a related field, reading knowledge of modern Chinse and prior training in Classical Chinese, and ideally propose a topic in one of the two areas in which I am currently working: history of Chinese painting or China in the Global Middle Ages. MA applicants may come from any background and be interested in any subfield of Chinese art -- curiosity and a willingness to learn are the most important requirements at that level.
Recently I completed serving as Principal Investigator of the Getty Foundation Connecting Art Histories Project "Global and Postglobal Perspectives on Medieval Art and Art History;" I have also been the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art (USA) and a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute among other major awards. My publications include: Reading Revolution: Art and Literacy during China's Cultural Revolution (Coach House Books, 2016) and Looking Modern: East Asian Visual Culture from the Treaty Ports to World War II (University of Chicago Press, 2009). My articles and essays have appeared in Art History, Journal of Asian Studies, Medieval Encounters, Orientations, and other journals, as well as in volumes edited by James Elkins, Thomas daCosta Kaufmann, Jerome Silbergeld, Eugene Wang, Wu Hung, and others. I have presented papers at four CIHA congresses (2000, London; 2004, Montreal; 2008, Melbourne; 2016 Beijing) among other venues.
Prospective PhD students should have formal training in Chinese art history or a related field, reading knowledge of modern Chinse and prior training in Classical Chinese, and ideally propose a topic in one of the two areas in which I am currently working: history of Chinese painting or China in the Global Middle Ages. MA applicants may come from any background and be interested in any subfield of Chinese art -- curiosity and a willingness to learn are the most important requirements at that level.
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Exhibition Review by Jennifer Purtle（裴珍妮）
artist Matthew Wong (b. 1984, Toronto–d. 2019, Edmonton), ‘Blue View’ at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), displays the most recent works made by Wong before his untimely death by suicide. A protean image maker, Matthew Wong painted inventively in oil and gouache, mobilizing a vast knowledge of Euro-American and East Asian painting that far surpassed the sources he noted in interviews (for example, Vogel, 2022). Wonderfully, the AGO exhibition, organized by the museum’s chief curator Julian Cox, presents Wong’s paintings without over-interpreting them: the catalogue text and didactic materials in the galleries are brief. These
laconic statements permit Wong’s paintings, which reward close looking, distant views, and repeated encounters, to be seen for their considerable technical strengths.