Professor Wang teaches courses in Asian art history and specializes in the study of Chinese art from the Han through Tang Dynasties (3rd century BCE–10th century CE). Her dissertation focused on esoteric Buddhist art of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) in China — in particular, on the introduction of mandalas, diagrammatic representations of Buddhist deities and cosmology, into Buddhist rituals and visual culture. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, and the Pittsburgh Foundation. In 2006, she co-curated an exhibit of Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) small-scale animal sculptures entitled “A Bronze Menagerie: Mat Weights of Early China” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, which resulted in an exhibition catalogue by the same title for which she was the main author. She has also held museum internships at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as a research assistantship at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Her future plans are to publish her findings on mandalas in China and to expand her research in order to consider the transmission of mandalas from China to Japan in the early 9th century.
(Photo taken at the Longmen Caves, in Luoyang, Henan Province) |
