Wen-shing Chou specializes in art of China and Inner Asia. Chou holds a BA in Art History from the University of Chicago, and a MA and PhD in History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. Her 2018 book Mount Wutai: Visions of a Sacred Buddhist Mountain (Princeton University Press) won Honorable Mention for the Joseph Levenson Prize (China Pre-1900) from the Association for Asian Studies. Chou’s research has been supported by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation Scholar Grant, the Mellon fellowship and membership of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Ittleson Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, Kyoto. Her articles have appeared in The Art Bulletin, the Journal of Asian Studies, the Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, and the Archives of Asian Art.
Chou recently co-curated and co-edited and C.C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction (Hirmer Verlag, 2023) on the artistic experimentations of twentieth century’s preeminent connoisseur and collector of Chinese art. The exhibition and publication are carried out in collaboration with Daniel M. Greenberg (University of Minnesota) and students at Hunter College and the University of Minnesota. Chou is a member of the advisory council at the Rubin Museum of Art, where she also served as an advisory member of Project Himalayan Art and contributed to the newly published Himalayan Art in 108 Objects. Chou’s current book-in-progress, Shaping Time: Art of Rebirth in China and Inner Asia, explores the visual and material culture of reincarnation within the Gelukpa sphere of influence from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
