Di Wang is an art historian and curator. Her work focuses on art and culture of East Asia from the late-nineteenth century to the present. Following her doctorate, she was a Departmental Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Oxford (2021–2024). She is at work on her first book that addresses the surprising entanglement of medicine, science, and revolutionary politics in the genesis of a socially engaged modern art and visual culture in China, offering the first inter-disciplinary history on how science and medicine shaped the contours of avant-garde thinking in China during the modern period.
As a curator and cultural producer, she managed a series of international exhibitions for the contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang in New York. Her curatorial and theatre projects have been recognized with the W. H. Pembroke Prize and supported by the Pembroke Annual Art Fund.
Di’s current research investigates how vision was theorized, practiced, and instrumentalized in practices of healing in early modern China, and how these transhistorical connections between past epistemologies and their contemporary afterlives continue to shape the body and techniques of the observers. Her forthcoming exhibition project, in collaboration with co-curators Joon Lee and Yuri Yamada, explores kinship and radical care in contemporary photography from East Asia. The exhibition will open at St John’s College at the University of Oxford in spring 2027.
Inspired by bell hooks and her vision of education as the practice of freedom, Di cultivates the classroom as an inclusive environment that fosters collaborative learning and community building. In her history and theory courses at AVA, she incorporates writing as a visual practice and supports students to build writing as a fundamental element of their artistic journey, as a form of engaging both the external world and negotiating one’s interiority through embodied work. She advocates teaching practices that embrace different modes of knowing and processing modalities and also sits on the advisory board for Oxford Neurodivergent Education for Students, Teaching & Learning (NESTL).
Media Interview Grant Education