Teaching experiences: America (2009 to the present) and Great Britain (2007-08).

MONUMENTS OF ASIA (first year seminar)

Concentrating on art history and architecture, the course explores the often-contested ideas of cultural heritage, collective memory, and regional identity, through scrutiny of artistic/cultural exchanges between East, South, and Southeast Asia. It will focus on three categories: monuments of religions, monuments of cultures, and monuments of landscape. Specific sites studied will vary each semester.

THE CURATORIAL PROJECT (major’s practicum course, with a formal exhibition) 

In this course, students learn about the theory and practice of museum work by collaboratively curating an exhibition at the university museum on a given theme using local collections. In the end, students will have gained a synthetic understanding of curatorship as a collaborative activity requiring critical thinking, public communication, and hands-on application of theoretical and practical knowledge.  Course site of Spring 2020 for the exhibition SCALES of CHAOS: The Dance of Art & Contemporary Science.

THEORY & METHODS OF ART HISTORY (major's junior seminar)

This course provides an overview of art historical practice. It aims to acquaint you with the history of practices, methods, and theories in art history and to introduce you to some of the ongoing critical discussions in the discipline. It focuses on reading very diverse texts. Throughout the course, we will explore many aspects of research--the diverse methods, working assumptions, and intellectual strategies that have been and continue to be used by art historians. When reading both theory and research we shall pay particular attention to the ways authors structure their arguments and make their points. 

SENIOR RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM (major's senior seminar)

A required “capstone” seminar for Art History majors. Students will expand and refine a research paper already written for an earlier art history course, towards the standard of academic publication. The seminar will conclude with a public colloquium and a publication of the collections of papers. Fulfills the Major Writing and Computing Requirements. Course site of Spring 2021.

INK PAINTING: history, theory and technique

A comprehensive examination of the art of Chinese ink painting, its history, theory, and basic techniques. Artistic developments are examined against debates on art, aesthetics, history, and cultural identity in China from the 5th to the 20th centuries. The arts of the literati, the eccentrics and the courts, mountain-and-water (landscape), birds-and-flower, figure painting, narrative painting, Chan (Zen) painting, modern abstraction, and contemporary reinvention are considered. Practice sessions will be conducted to foster an empirical understanding of the art of brush, the specificities of ink painting techniques, and their relationship to painting theory, appreciation, connoisseurship, exchange, display, and collection. Opportunities to work directly with facsimiles of painting scrolls and albums at the Special Collections.

WOODBLOCK PRINT: inception, evolution and revival

A history of the book and woodblock print in East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam), starting from its development in relation to Buddhism when sutras were first printed in medieval China, through its peaks in Ming Dynasty China and Edo Japan, to its revival in the post-WWII and contemporary art world. Besides the traditional focuses on book art and Ukiyo-e, the class will also study contemporary creative woodblock prints in coordination with a studio course on print-making. Students will also have the opportunity to work with materials in the collections of the university museum/library and local private collectors.

JAPANESE PRINT CURATION (co-taught with History, with a formal exhibition) 

A practicum seminar where students learn about the art, history and technique of Japanese woodblock print-making through hands-on experience with collection materials at the university museum.  It concluded with a student-curated exhibition: TREE to MOUNTAIN: The Woodblock Prints of Tōshi Yoshida. 

CONTEMPORARY GARDEN AND LANDSCAPE ART  (MA seminar, co-taught with Professor Stephen Bann)

This seminar runs a critical review of the evolution of gardens and landscape art & architecture from 1900 onwards, both public and private, with emphasis on their interaction with contemporary movements in visual arts, architecture, and popular culture. Starting from the development of the Modernist movement, but focusing, in particular, on post-war and contemporary land art and garden creation in Europe, America, and Asia, it traces the parallel threads—modernist thinking, changing aesthetics, postcolonial influence, scientific discovery, environmental concern—which have interwoven into a contemporary expression of the correlation between human and nature. When studied as works of art in their own right, gardens and landscape, like museums, provide a complex form of contribution to art. They contain many issues of great interest for scholarship, but their study also demands interdisciplinary and multicultural thinking that moves beyond the traditional focus on individual artwork. Students were encouraged to reconsider taken-for-granted categories and to engage in a thicker history of art by “looking at the complex”.