Education

Ph.D. University of Kansas

Bio

Amanda Wangwright has published on twentieth-century Chinese art, its transnational patronage networks, conceptualizations of gender and the body, and unfolding canonization. Her book, The Golden Key: Modern Women Artists and Gender Negotiations in Republican China (1911-1949), investigates artists’ public personas and feminist artistic practice, as well as the wartime developments that led to their exclusion from the canon of modern Chinese art. Professor Wangwright’s other recent publications similarly reconstruct the transitions and transactions of the art world in this pivotal period in Chinese history, including a book chapter demonstrating how the female nude became the visual model of the national reform movement, and an article reframing the war years as a period of vibrant artistic exchange and transnational patronage. Her most recent article contends that a still life by the modernist painter Qiu Ti (1906-1958) served as a complex visual rebuttal to the socio-political pressures she encountered in the leadup to the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).

Current research projects include a monograph on the modern art of wartime China (c. 1937-1949), which explores the factionalism and fanaticism of wartime China's art community and addresses topics such as the anxiety of national erasure as pictured in romanticized depictions of the minorities of the Chinese interior, artist-led campaigns soliciting wartime support from international audiences, and the collaborative art activism of the anti-Japanese resistance movement. An additional research project focuses on the portrayal of artists in popular culture and the modern professionalization of art in in early twentieth-century China. A separate line of research analyzes Republican-period depictions of the male nude in natural landscapes in connection with shifting perspectives of modern masculinity.

Research Areas

• Twentieth-Century Chinese Art
• Gender Studies, Chinese Feminism, and Women Artists of the Republican Period
• The Nude and Depictions of the Body in Modern Chinese Art
• The Professionalization of Art in Early Twentieth-Century China (Societies, Exhibitions, and Print Culture)
• Interconnections between Chinese Modernist Art, Xihua (Western-Style Painting) and Global Modern Art
• Modern Art, Nationalism, and Propaganda in Wartime China

Publications

• “Qiu Ti’s Still Life and the Clash of Commodity, Domesticity, and Patriotism in 1930s Shanghai,” Archives of Asian Art1 (2022): 129-150.
• The Golden Key: Modern Women Artists and Gender Negotiations in Republican China (1911-1949) (Brill, 2021).
• “For William Fenn’s Elegant Enjoyment: Western Patronage in Wartime China (1937-1949) and the ‘Discovery’ of Modern Chinese Art.” The Register VIII, No. 5 (2018): 22-39.
• “The Sick Man of Asia and the Anatomically Perfect Woman: Remodeling Republican China’s (Body) Image through the Visual Arts.” In Visualizing the Body in Art, Anatomy, and Medicine since 1800: Models and Modeling, edited by Andrew Graciano, 181-200. Routledge, 2019.
• “Contemporary Chinese Art Since 1976.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies, edited by Tim Wright, n.p. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
• “Double Vision: The Culture China Overseas Chinese Women’s Invitational Exhibition (Exhibition Review),” SECAC Review 16, no. 5 (2015): 661-664.

Recent Awards and Honors

• Taiwan Fellowship, Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2022.
• Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies Individual Grant, 2021.
• Faculty Research Initiative, College of Arts and Sciences, UofSC, 2020.
• Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation Book Publication Grant, 2020.
• Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies Book Publication Grant, 2020.

Courses

LOWER-LEVEL CAROLINA CORE (GHS) COURSE
History of Asian Art

MID-LEVEL LECTURE COURSES
History of Japanese Art
History of Chinese Art
Twentieth-Century Chinese Art

UPPER-LEVEL SEMINAR COURSES
Modern Art in Asia
Women in Chinese Art
Buddhist Art in East Asia
Politics & Propaganda in 20^th Century Chinese Art
Tradition & Transformation in Modern Chinese Art

STUDY ABROAD GLOBAL CLASSROOM PROGRAM, JAPAN
Art and Culture of Japan (Honors Course)