Prof. Di WANG, Wendy (MA, Columbia; DPhil, University of Oxford) is an Assistant Professor of History of Art at the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, specializing in modern and contemporary art in East Asia. Before joining HKBU in 2025, she served as Departmental Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Oxford from 2021 to 2024. Her research lies at the intersection of art history and the history of science and medicine, an interdisciplinary approach that shapes her book manuscript, Body Politics: The Scientific Gaze in the Arts of Modern China, currently under review with Penn State University Press. She is a recipient of a Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC) Early Career Scheme grant for 2026/27 and is co-curating the exhibition Reclaiming Radical Intimacies in Trans-Asia, which opens at St John’s College, University of Oxford, in January 2027.
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).
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