Kuiyi Shen

Kuiyi Shen is Professor of Asian Art History, Theory, and Criticism, Vice Chair and Director of Ph.D. Program at the University of California, San Diego. His teaching and writing has focus on Chinese and Japanese art with an emphasis on modern and contemporary Chinese art and Sino-Japanese art exchanges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He received a BA in fine arts from the Shanghai Normal University and an MA and PhD in art history from the Ohio State University. Prior to his 1989 relocation to the United States, Kuiyi Shen served as the director of the art book department at the Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House. Shen taught at Ohio University, State University of New York at Buffalo, Rice University, and University of Oregon before joining the UCSD faculty. Professor Shen is the author and co-author of many books and exhibition catalogues on modern and contemporary Chinese art, including, in recent times, Liangyou: Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis, 1926-1945 (2013), Echo of the Universe: Ink Art of Liu Kuo-sung (2016), Painting Her Way: The Ink Art of Fang Zhaoling (2017), Boundless: Ongoing Chinese Ink Art (2017), and Li Huayi: Landscapes from a Master’s Heart (2018). Shen's articles have been published in The Making and Remaking of China’s “Red Classics”: Politics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture (HKU Press, 2017), No Room for Form (China Wenlian Press, 2017), The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art (UC Press, 2013), Cai Guo-Qiang: The Sky Ladder (Prestel, 2012), Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2011), and many others. Professor Shen has also worked as a curator and curatorial consultant for projects including, among the most recent, Dancing with Rope—Ink Art of Ross Lewis (Today Art Museum, Beijing, 2015), Echo of Universe—Ink Art of Liu Kuo-Sung (China Art Museum, Shanghai, 2016), Brushwork/Exploration—Ink Art of Pan Gongkai (China Art Museum, Shanghai, 2016), No Room for Form—Contemporary Paintings from Four American Artists (Shandong Art Museum, China, 2017), Boundless: Ongoing Chinese Ink Art (Art Museum, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, 2017), Art of Fang Zhaoling (Asia Society Hong Kong Center, 2017), Times: New Works of Li Tingting (Liu Haisu Museum, Shanghai, 2018). He has been the Managing Editor of Brill’s book series Modern Asian Art and Visual Culture since 2010. He served as a juror for The Seventh Yishu Award for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art (2017), Member of the Exhibition Advisory Committee, Experimental Art from China, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2018), and Jury Member of The Fourth International Awards for Art Criticism (IAAC), London/Shanghai, 2018. Shen’s teaching includes a broad range of courses and topics from surveys on the arts of China, twentieth-century Chinese art, the arts of Japan, Asian art, to thematic lectures and seminars on Chinese landscape painting of Song and Yuan, Chinese literati and court painting, tradition and modernity in twentieth-century China, contemporary Chinese art and mass culture, Japanese Buddhist art and architecture, Japanese painting and Ukiyo-e prints, and the arts of modern Japan.