About
Eugene Y. Wang
Eugene Yuejin Wang (Chinese: 汪悦进) is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University. His research ranges from early Chinese funerary art and archaeology to medieval Buddhist visual culture, painting, film, contemporary art, and digital media. He is also the founding director of Harvard FAS CAMLab.
At Harvard, Wang holds positions and committee affiliations in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, the Standing Committee on Archaeology, the Committee on the Study of Religion, Theater, Dance & Media (TDM), and the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies. He is also one of the three core faculty who oversee Harvard’s Ph.D. program in East Asian Art, together with Yukio Lippit and Melissa McCormick.
Wang is the author of Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (2005), a study of medieval Chinese Buddhist visual programs and the relationship among scripture, pictorial organization, ritual, spatial experience, and cultural memory. The book received the Sakamoto Nichijin Academic Achievement Award in Japan and has been reviewed in Buddhist studies, Asian art history, and Chinese studies.
Early life and education
Wang was a native of Zhenjiang, Jiangsu, China. He studied English at Fudan University in Shanghai, receiving a B.A. in 1983 and an M.A. in comparative literature in 1986. In a 2011 interview, Wang identified the literary theorist, translator, and painter Wu Lifu (伍蠡甫) as an important teacher. He recalled that his early interest in the movement between poetic and pictorial imagery developed from Wu’s teaching in literary and art theory; Fudan’s own account of Wu’s teaching also lists Wang among his students.
Wang has described the literary-theoretical climate of the 1980s as formative to his later art-historical method, particularly the practice of reading against the grain rather than treating a text or image as a transparent statement of its subject. Before his art-historical career was established, he published criticism on Chinese cinema, including essays on Old Well (1988), Red Sorghum (1989), cinematic alterity (1989), and self-representation in Samsara (1991). He later studied at Harvard University, receiving an A.M. in art history and a Ph.D. in art history in 1997.
Academic career
Wang’s doctoral research was supported by the 1995–1996 Ittleson Fellowship in non-Western art at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. After teaching in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago in 1997, he joined the Harvard faculty the same year. He served as assistant professor from 1997 to 2002 and Gardner Cowles Associate Professor from 2002 to 2005 before being appointed Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art in 2005.
His Harvard appointments reflect the interdisciplinary range of his teaching and research. In addition to his home appointment in History of Art and Architecture, Harvard identifies him with Archaeology, the Study of Religion, Theater, Dance & Media, and Inner Asian and Altaic Studies. Within the East Asian Art Program, he helps oversee doctoral training in Chinese and Japanese art history; the program connects HAA with East Asian Languages and Civilizations and emphasizes object study, museum research, and field-based training.
Wang has held fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the J. Paul Getty Trust. He was a Shutzer Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2016–2017. He also served as art-history editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism (2004).
Scholarship
Across different periods and media, Wang’s scholarship has often treated images as components of larger systems rather than as isolated motifs. In a 2011 Chinese-language interview, he described an “internal evidence” (内证) approach that begins with relationships among images within a tomb, cave, temple, reliquary, or other ensemble, attends to departures from established visual conventions, and attempts to reconstruct the design logic by which an image program operated. At a 2017 conference at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he presented a related line of inquiry under the rubric of “cognitive art history,” asking how visual evidence might be used to reconstruct modes of cognition in early China even when textual documentation is limited. Harvard’s current faculty profile similarly characterizes his research as a cognitive study of art and of images as worldmaking systems.
His 2005 monograph Shaping the Lotus Sutra focuses on medieval Chinese visual culture associated with the Lotus Sutra. Rather than treating Buddhist images as direct illustrations of a single scripture, the book asks how complex visual programs drew together material from multiple texts, ritual practice, political culture, indigenous cosmology, and conventions of seeing.
Wang’s Buddhist scholarship extends beyond the Lotus Sutra. His essay “Of the True Body: The Famen Monastery Relics and Corporeal Transformation in Tang Imperial Culture” analyzes the Famen Temple relic crypt as an interconnected program of relics, reliquaries, images, and imperial ritual rather than as a collection of discrete objects. Other studies address Buddhist cave imagery, icons and shadow images, visualization, monastic space, and the spatial organization of religious experience.
Harvard FAS CAMLab and curatorial work
Wang founded Harvard FAS CAMLab in 2018 as an interdisciplinary initiative linking humanistic research with digital and immersive media. The lab has developed projection-based installations, films, spatial reconstructions, and other experiential formats for research on Chinese and Buddhist art. Wang has described these media as extensions of questions that also drive his art history: cognition, spatial sequence, worldmaking, and the reconstruction of historical modes of viewing.
An early public account of CAMLab’s aims appeared in a January 2020 Shanghai Daily interview. The interview situated CAMLab within an effort to address the limits of verbal language in accounting for visual experience and described digital media technologies as tools for reconstructing historical modes of visual imagination. It characterized the lab as a collaborative platform bringing together humanistic research, emerging media, and creative practice.