Artistic practices, networks and material culture China Focus
At the institute, the research of Chinese art history spans painting, photography, Buddhist art, ritual and material culture, and the circulation of images and objects across Asia and Europe.
Projects developed by the faculty focus on exploring artistic practices and networks, as well as habits connected to material culture. Doctoral projects also engage with questions of methodology, conservation, legacies of collecting, and contemporary art. This broad perspective situates Chinese art in dialogue with wider art historical debates.
Prof. Sarah E. Fraser
Prof. Sarah E. Fraser’s research projects explore historical and theoretical investigations of Asian, European, and global contemporary art with a focus on transcultural exchanges of media and designs; photographic subjects developed in Pan-Asian contexts during the nineteenth century; painting modernities in East Asia; cultural heritage studies encompassing investigations of monument destruction, preservation, and removal; and digital humanities approaches for Asian and Buddhist art.
Current book projects include Ink and Oil: Chinese Artists Trained in Europe (1920-1960), co-edited with Prof. Kuiyi Shen and Dr. Giulia Pra Floriani (forthcoming 2026); and a study on historical memory, cultural heritage, and monuments in twentieth-century China. Fraser also serves Editor of Archives of Asian Art, Duke University Press, and the Series in Transcultural Asian Art, published by Springer.
Prof. Sarah E. Fraser is a full professor who can accept and supervise doctoral students.
Dr. Monica Klasing Chen
Dr. Monica Klasing Chen’s habilitation project analyses the formation of habits in relation to material culture in China. The project studies normative texts from the 19th and 20th- centuries to investigate practices of recycling, changing meanings of material culture, and new habits that take the mechanization of household labor into account. It engages scholarly debates on waste, Gender Studies and Intellectual History.
She is developing a digital humanities project with Dr. Shih-Pei Chen at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Knowledge, as a member of the “Common Knowledge” working group. The project makes use of visual analysis technologies to explore transcultural transfers of visual materials between China and Japan. She is also studying the use of hand charts in Chinese daily-use encyclopedias and manuals, as a member of the academic network of the Knowing Hands project, led by Marta Hanson and Stéphanie Homola
Doctoral research projects supervised by Prof. Sarah E. Fraser
- Bai Bing:
Demythologizing Ni Zan: Artistic Practice, Everyday Life, and Social Networks (1306-1374) - Giacomo Cacciaguerra:
Out of China, Where Then? Sinophone Contemporary Art Beyond Chineseness - Chen Tianyi:
Making Bhutanese Art: Dzong, Absence, and Reconsidering the Agency and Transculturality of Bhutanese Art and Art History - Cui Yixiong:
Kalligraphie Buddhistischer Heiliger Texte Auf Steinpfeilern - Li Chenqi:
Chamber of Sacred Images: Ritual and Representation in Eastern Han Tomb Murals, 2525-220 AD - Lili Zhang Hanselmann:
Defining Fish Image: A Study of Artistic Decorations and Sociocutural Relations in 16-19 Centuries China - Liu Heng:
The reception and assimilation of European art in China and Japan: from 1582 to 1644 - Mei Lin:
Buddhist Pantheon in Cave Shrines, 5th-8th c. - Wang Jialu:
China’s Artistic Diaspora in the Context of Nation Building, 1912-1949 - Wang Yuechen:
Investigation on the Historical Tradition: Mural in the Making of Modern Art in Tibet - Zhou Muyu:
Trade and Brush: Transcultural Trajectories of Guangcai Porcelain from the 18th to the 21st Century