Research Expertise and Interest

art and law; modern and contemporary art; Chinese art; Qing empire; Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta

Research Description

Winnie Wong is a Professor in the Department of Rhetoric.  Her research is concerned with the history and present of artistic authorship, with a focus on interactions between China and the West. Her theoretical interests revolve around the critical distinctions of high and low, true and fake, art and commodity, originality and imitation, and, conceptual and manual labor, and thus her work focuses on objects and practices at the boundary of these categories. Her first book, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (University of Chicago Press, 2014; Joseph Levenson Book Prize 2015), is a study of Dafen village in Shenzhen, China, the world’s largest production center for oil-on-canvas painting. The book is an ethnography of the encounters between artisanal painters and global conceptual artists. Forthcoming (University of Chicago Press, Fall 2025) is The Many Names of Anonymity, a study of the nameless and "nameful" portraitists of Guangzhou (Canton), in the 18th and early 19th centuries when the city served as the sole port of trade between China and Europe. She is currently at work on another monograph on the Canton trade of the 18th-19th centuries, this time focusing on natural history illustrations and epistemes of fact and fantasy.

With Mary Ann O’Donnell and Jonathan Bach, Winnie Wong co-edited Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City (University of Chicago Press, 2017). With Jing Wang, she co-edited a special issue of positions: asia critique on visual culture and digital dissent (CELJ 2015 Best Special Issue Award). Since 2015, with Amy Adler, Peter Karol, and Martha Buskirk, she has organized several workshops on art and law, primarily thinking beyond copyright. Wong has published articles on Scientific Authorship and Genomic Sequencing, Smallness in Hong Kong Art, on forgery in the Library, and essays on the Chinese-Canadian painter Matthew Wong. She has essays forthcoming on the Chinesenessness of Marcel Duchamp, on the Hong Kong artist Kongkee, and Women Forgers. She sometimes inhabits the persona of fictional editors, and has started collecting their work in a volume of conjectural histories, titled Typical Artists: Chinese Biographies of Western Geniuses.

At Berkeley, Wong is a faculty affiliate of the History of Art, Center for Chinese Studies, Asian American Research Center, Institute of European Studies, and Global Metropolitan Studies. She teaches undergraduate courses on visual culture, visual rhetoric, and interpretation, including classes on the Theory of the Copy, Rhetoric of the Image, Archives and Bureaucracies, and Poetry and Speculative Fiction. She has taught curatorial-based research classes for the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, the Mellon New Strategies in the Humanities, and the Berkeley Discovery Initiative. She teaches graduate seminars that investigate the methodological intersections of Art and Ethnography, Art and Law, Theory and Practice, History of Art and History of Science. She especially welcomes graduate students who want to work on the art, visual culture, or urbanism of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, the many Chinese diasporas, the post-socialist international, or other contexts of overlapping imperialisms.

As an undergraduate, Wong was a Senior Fellow of Dartmouth College where she wrote her thesis on Public Space and Public Protest in postcolonial Hong Kong. She obtained her Master’s of Science from the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at MIT where she wrote her thesis on Product Placement and the Hollywood Film. She then worked in the curatorial department of the Art of Europe at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and directed the curatorial program of a non-profit, new media exhibition space in Cambridge, MA, before obtaining her PhD at the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at MIT. Prior to joining Berkeley in 2013, she was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Education: PhD (History, Theory, and Criticism), MIT

SMArchS (History, Theory, and Criticism), MIT