Research Bio

Winnie Wong is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an art historian with a special interest in fakes, forgeries, and counterfeits. Her work explores authorship, property, and likeness through interdisciplinary inquiry, while her research is animated by the global reach of artists in and from the cities of Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. She is the author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (University of Chicago Press, 2014), which was awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize in 2015. She is the co-editor of Learning from Shenzhen (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Her forthcoming book is The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Her articles have appeared in Current Anthropology, Law & Literature, Future Anterior, positions: asia critiques, and Journal of Visual Culture, and she has written essays on art for Artforum, Critical Times, M+ Museum of Visual Culture, MMK Frankfurt, Asian Art Museum SF, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Karma Books. Her work has been translated into Portuguese, Romanian, Chinese, and Japanese. Her research has been supported with grants from the Mellon Foundation, ACLS, SSRC, CLIR, Henry Luce Foundation, Harvard Milton Fund, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Winnie graduated as an interdisciplinary Senior Fellow from Dartmouth College, received her SMArchS and PhD from History, Theory + Criticism at MIT, was elected a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. Listen to Winnie discuss her work on the podcasts New Books Network, BBC The Forum, 99 Percent Invisible, and Berkeley Voices.

Research Expertise and Interest

art and law, modern and contemporary art, Chinese art, Qing Empire, Hong Kong