The East Asia Program is honored to have Wu Hung, the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago, to give the 2025-2026 Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture: “Emperor Qianlong’s Peep Boxes: A Case of 18th-century Global Interaction in Art and Visual Culture.”

This is a hybrid event. To attend online, please register here with your cornell.edu email address: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_OKbtn2tEQ92ZW_FrQ_FaNw

Abstract: By focusing on a group of newly discovered visual materials—most notably a pair of peepshow boxes produced in Europe and China, respectively—this talk examines a series of transformations unfolding in eighteenth-century art and visual culture across geographic and cultural boundaries.

Bio: Wu Hung has published widely on both traditional and contemporary Chinese art. His interest in both traditional and modern/contemporary Chinese art has led him to experiment with different ways to integrate these conventionally separate phases into new kinds of art historical narratives, as exemplified by his Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture (1995), The Double Screen: Medium and Representation of Chinese Pictorial Art (1996), Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square: the Creation of a Political Space (2005), A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (2012), and Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China (2016). Several of his ongoing projects follow this direction to explore the interrelationship between art medium, pictorial image, and architectural space, the dialectical relationship between absence and presence in Chinese art and visual culture, and the relationship between art discourse and practice.

Wu Hung is Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and sits on the boards and advisory committees of many research institutes and museums in the United States and China.

Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture

In 2014 on the 100th anniversary of Hu Shih's graduation from Cornell, EAP initiated an annual distinguished lecture in honor of the philosopher and statesman. Leading scholars of Chinese and East Asian studies are invited to speak on critical issues in their field of research. These lectures are archived as a resource for the Cornell community and beyond. Learn more about one of Cornell's most distinguished alumni, Hu Shih.

Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture videos and programs are permanently archived in the Cornell eCommons.About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.