OCAT Institute | 2019 Annual Lecturer: Craig Clunas

The OCAT Institute is pleased to announce Craig Clunas, Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at University of Oxford, as its 2019 Annual Lecturer. The Annual Lecture is designed as a three-part series, and will take place in early September 2019 in Beijing. Centered around the general topic ‘Three Transnational Moments in the History of Chinese Art’, the three lectures are respectively and tentatively titled:

The lectures focus on the 20th century. Theoretical concerns including modernity from a global perspective form connections to Clunas’s ongoing interest in 'Early Modern China’, continuing his experimentation with such historiographical strategy. The OCAT Institute will host a variety of events including public lectures, research seminars, publications revolving around the annual lecture.

Craig Clunas (b.1954) holds a Ph.D in Mongol and Chinese Studies from SOAS, University of London. He worked at Victoria and Albert Museum for fifteen years as a curator and researcher, before taking up faculty positions consecutively at University of Sussex and SOAS. From 2007 to 2018, he held the chair of art history at Oxford. In honor of his distinguished research work, Clunas was elected in 2004 as Fellow of British Academy.

Clunas’s research and publication mainly focus on Ming China, as well as 20th century and contemporary China. Since the early 1990s, he has published a series of monographs on Ming material and visual culture, including Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (1991), Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (1997), and Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming, 1470-1559 (2004). These represent his continuous exploration and contribution to the field. Clunas has strategically integrated various theoretical discourses into his inquiry, mainly Bourdieu’s sociology, and anthropological theories, the latter echoed with the anthropological turn in art history as practiced in Europe and North America at the end of the last century. These two theoretical discourses are interwoven and complementary, and together feed into Clunas’s analysis that is intentionally distanced from the usual aesthetic approach in art history. 

At the same time, his ability in creatively mining the historical materials and close reading of texts has provided his work with rich evidence, dissecting the social stakes in the production, circulation and reception of art. Clunas’s work is thus visionary, unique and powerful in the field of art history. On the other hand, by tracing art commodities and their meanings in motion, and treating the above as symptoms of social transformations, Clunas has also made important contributions to ‘Early Modern China’ as a historiographical topic from the perspective of Ming art and luxury goods consumption.

As an open initiative dedicated to research in art history, the OCAT Institute Annual Lecture Series intends to create a platform of exchange and dialogue between the academic community in China and abroad. As one of the essential components of OCAT Institute’s public educational programs, the Annual Lectures promotes an integrated methodology that seeks to cultivate an open spirit of academic research, bridging contemporary art research, critical theory, and the history of ideas and culture.

Since the opening of the OCAT Institute in 2015, the Annual Lectures has seen four series of successful programs. Delivered respectively by the French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, the art historian, critic, and curator Wu Hung, the archaeologist and art historian Jas? Elsner, and the famous scholar, critic, theorist W. J. T Mitchell, these three-part lecture series are entitled Image,History, Poem: 3 Lectures on the Visual Art of S.M. Eisenstein (2015),  Space in Art History (2016), Eurocentric and Beyond: Art History, the Global Turn and the Possibilities of Comparativism (2017), and Metapictures : Images and the Discourse of Theory (2018). 

Meanwhile, the previous Annual Lecturers also curated or helped to realize exhibitions at the OCAT Institute—Memory Burns (2015), An Exhibition About Exhibitions: Displaying Contemporary Art in the 1990s (2016), Sites and Images (2017) and Metapictures (2018). As part of each annual program, the Institute also organized a series of research seminars and public forums, to discuss the scholarship, curatorial practices, and intellectual contributions of each Annual Lecturer. These events inspired discussion and drew attention from academics and art historians both in China and abroad.

OPEN CALL: 2019 Research-Based Curatorial Project

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