Wen-shing Chou specializes in art of China and Inner Asia. Her book Mount Wutai: Visions of a Sacred Buddhist Mountain (Princeton University Press, 2018) explores the Tibetan Buddhist transformation of China’s preeminent pilgrimage mountain during the Qing dynasty. Mount Wutai received Honorable Mention for the Joseph Levenson Prize (China Pre-1900) from the Association for Asian Studies. Chou’s research has been supported by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation Scholar Grant, the Mellon fellowship and membership of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Ittleson Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, Kyoto. Her essays have appeared in The Art Bulletin, the Journal of Asian Studies, the Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, the Archives of Asian Art, and the Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies.
Working with M.A. students at Hunter College, Chou co-curated and co-edited and C.C. Wang: Lines of Abstraction (Hirmer Verlag, 2023) on the artistic experimentations of twentieth century’s influential connoisseur and collector of Chinese art. C.C. Wang was awarded Honorable Mention for the Bei Shan Tang Catalogue Prize in Chinese Art History by the Association of Asian Studies. Chou is a member of the advisory council at the Rubin Museum of Art, where she also served as an advisory member of Project Himalayan Art and contributed to the recently published Himalayan Art in 108 Objects. Chou’s current book project, Shaping Time: Art of Rebirth in China and Inner Asia, explores the visual and material culture of reincarnation within the Gelukpa sphere of influence from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
Chou received her BA in Art History from the University of Chicago, and a MA and PhD in History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley.
