Congratulations to Nancy P. Lin who will be joining the History of Art & Visual Studies faculty beginning July 1st, 2024. Lin has been a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow since 2021 and will continue on to a full-time tenure track Assistant Professorship this summer. While at Cornell, Lin has received high praise from students through her course ARTH 3803 “Urban Interfaces: Art, Architecture, and Urbanism in China at the turn of the 21st Century” and she has also successfully been running the Research in Art and Visual Culture Workshop since 2022. Lin will be teaching ARTH 1100 “Art Histories: An Introduction” in the Fall of 2024.
Lin specializes in modern and contemporary Chinese art and architecture with a particular interest in the relationship between art and urbanism. Studying contemporary Chinese art through a transregional perspective, her current book project, Art On-Site: Situating Global Contemporaneity in 1990s China, examines locally situated, yet globally oriented site-based art practices in China during the 1990s and early 2000s. It explores the aesthetic and socio-political stakes for how and why artists during this period began to work “on-site” in everyday urban spaces such as city streets, construction sites, and other unconventional locations. She is also at work on a series of projects exploring the history of performance art in China and East Asia. Incorporating materials from Cornell’s Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-garde Art, this project considers the documentary mediation of performance art and issues surrounding performative action’s (in)visibility, duration, and public impact. She is co-curator of the exhibition “Between Performance and Documentation: Contemporary Photography and Video from China” at the Johnson Museum of Art. Her recent publications have been featured in Art Journal, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and other edited volumes and exhibition catalogues.
