“Learning from Shenzhen”
Winnie Wong
Rhetoric & History of Art, UC Berkeley
Wednesday, November 8, 12:00-1:30pm
Cal Design Lab, Wurster 494, Wurster Hall
Part of the City as Nexus Colloquium; visitors welcome
Learning from Shenzhen (University of Chicago Press, 2017 ) presents an account of China’s contemporary transformation via one of its most important yet overlooked cities: Shenzhen, which has evolved form an experimental site for economic reform into a dominant city at the crossroads of the global economy.
In this installment of the Fall 2017 Colloquium, Winnie Wong will present on her experience working with other fieldwork researchers in Shenzhen, including the process of collaboration in the field and the importance of building an interdisciplinary network of collaborators.
Wong is a historian of modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a special interest in fakes, forgeries, frauds, copies, counterfeits, and other non-art challenges to authorship and originality. Her research is based in the southern Chinese cities of Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and her writing engages with Chinese and Western aesthetics, anthropology, intellectual property law, and popular culture. 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. Her articles have appeared in positions: asia critiques, the Journal of Visual Culture, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and she has written for Omagiu, Third Text Asia, and Artforum. Her work has been translated into Portuguese, Romanian, and Japanese. Her research has been supported with grants from the ACLS, SSRC, CLIR, Harvard Milton Fund, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Winnie was a Senior Fellow at Dartmouth College, and received her SMArchS and PhD in History, Theory and Criticism from MIT. She was elected a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows (2010-2013). She is currently associate professor of Rhetoric and History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley.