Claire Roberts
Claire Roberts is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Adelaide. She studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (1979–81) and has an MA from the University of Melbourne and a PhD from The Australian National University (ANU). She has been a Co-ordinate Research Scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University (2011); Research Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2009–2010); and Research Fellow with Geremie R. Barmé’s Federation Fellowship project at ANU (2006–2009). She was Senior Curator of Asian arts at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney (1988–2010). Claire has published widely on Chinese visual and material culture, and curated numerous exhibitions including The Great Wall of China (2006), Evolution & Revolution: Chinese Dress 1700s to Now (1997); and Post Mao Product: New Art From China (1992). She was curatorial adviser, Chinese art, for the Asia- Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, in 1993, 1996 and 1999. Her most recent books are Photography and China (forthcoming), Friendship in Art: Fou Lei and Huang Binhong (2010), Other Histories: Guan Wei’s Fable for a Contemporary World (2008), and The Great Wall of China (2006) edited with Geremie R. Barmé.
Eugene Wang
Eugene Wang is Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University. A 2005 Guggenheim Fellow, his book, Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (2005), received academic achievement award from Japan in 2006. He is the art history associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism (New York, 2004). He now serves on the editorial board of The Art Bulletin and advisory board of the Center for Advanced Studies for Visual Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. His extensive publications encompass a wide range of subjects, including ancient Chinese bronzes, tombs, sarcophagi, cave murals, reliquaries, landscapes, scroll paintings, calligraphy, woodblock prints, photography, and films. They have appeared in Art History, Art Bulletin, Critical Inquiry, Public Culture, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Cahiers d’Extrême- Asie and elsewhere. The film for which he wrote the script was screened at the Ninth Hawaii International Film Festival. He also translated Roland Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux into Chinese. He has also curated exhibitions on contemporary Chinese art, including Seeing Utopia: Visions of Contemporary Chinese Urbanscape at Harvard. His current book projects include Shades of Ink: Moments of Medium in Chinese Painting, and The First Emperor’s Last Breath which explores the shifting boundaries of interiority/exteriority in ancient Chinese conceptions of body and cosmos.
Zhang Letian
Zhang Letian is an independent writer, essayist and translator who lives and works in Shanghai. He is a graduate of East China University in political science and international law, and from 2004 to 2012 worked as a journalist, editor and copy director in Shanghai-based Chinese media companies. Zhang Letian is widely published as an essayist and book reviewer and is the author of interviews with leading writers and scholars including Amos Oz, Michael Sandell, Wolfgang Kubin and Colm Tobin. He has translated Beginnings by Edward W. Said, The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt, Camus and Sartre by Ronald Aronson, and Worrying about China by Gloria Davies. A series of essays on Chinese humour and the study of Xiangsheng (the most popular form of comic performance in China), one of his long-term research interests, is forthcoming. In 2012 he is a travelling writer in Israel, writing reports related to Israel, and working as a volunteer for ‘Israel in China’, a cultural programme initiated by Consulate-General of Israel in Shanghai.
(Roberts C. , Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture, 2012)
