Congratulations to Wu Hung, who has been awarded the 2022 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art by the College Art Association of America (CAA).
In announcing the award CAA noted: “The scope of [Wu’s] work has an epic quality, allowing arguments to unfold across centuries without losing sight of the very human presence of artists and audiences. He works in the discipline of art history as a poet-scholar who knows the brushstroke from the inside out, crafting prose of great clarity and nuance that opens the field to specialists and new readers alike.”
Wu Hung is the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as director of the Center for the Art of East Asia. A leading expert in Chinese visual culture, Professor Wu’s research and writing have been transformative to the study of East Asian art, drawing attention to the connections and transitions across images, space, and time. He is the author of numerous essays, exhibition catalogues, and books, including with Princeton University Press (PUP), A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chines Art and Visual Culture, which examines the changing significance of ruins as vehicles for cultural memory in Chinese art and visual culture from ancient times through to the twenty-first century.
A forthcoming PUP volume, Chinese Art and Dynastic Time, offers a sweeping look at how the development of Chinese art across millennia has been described in its original cultural, sociopolitical, and artistic contexts, and how these narratives were interwoven with contemporaneous artistic creation. In doing so, Wu reveals new pathways for the consideration of not only Chinese art, but also the whole of art history. The book derives from Wu’s 2019 A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts and will be published in April 2022, in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
The CAA Awards for Distinction are given annually to honor “individual artists, art historians, authors, museum professionals, and critics whose accomplishments transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.”