Jason Kuo

Jason C. Kuo is Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Core Faculty in Cinema and Media Studies, and Affiliate Professor in Asian American Studies, at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has taught at the National Taiwan University, Williams College, and Yale University. He was a Fellow at the Freer Gallery, a Research Associate at the University Art Museum (UC Berkeley), a Stoddard Fellow at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center (Harvard University), and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has received grants from the J. D. Rockefeller III Fund, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Henry Luce Foundation. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Taipei in 2001–2.

He is the author of Wang Yuanqi de shanshuihua yishu [Wang Yuanqi’s Art of Landscape Painting] (1981), Long tiandi yu xingnei [Trapping Heaven and Earth in the Cage of Form] (1986), The Austere Landscape: The Paintings of Hung-jen (1992), Yishushi yu yishu piping de tanshuo [Rethinking Art History and Art Criticism] (1996), Art and Cultural Politics in Postwar Taiwan (2000), Yishushi yu yishu piping de shijian [Practicing Art History and Art Criticism] (2002), Transforming Traditions in Modern Chinese Painting: Huang Pin-hung’s Late Work (2004), Chinese Ink Painting Now (2010), The Inner Landscape: The Paintings of Gao Xingjian (2013), The Poet’s Brush: Chinese Ink Paintings by Lo
Ch’ing (2016), and Huang Yao: Paintings of Poetic Ideas (Shiyitu) (2019). His co-authored book The Art of Huang Binhong (with Claire Roberts and Britta Erickson), volume 4 in the Modern Ink Series, is forthcoming from the University of Hawaii Press.

He has curated national and international exhibitions with accompanying catalogs such as Innovation within Tradition: The Painting of Huang Pin-hung (1989), Word as Image: The Art of Chinese Seal Engraving (1992), Born of Earth and Fire: Chinese Ceramics from the Scheinman Collection (1992), Heirs to a Great Tradition: Modern Chinese Paintings from the Tsien-hsiang-chai Collection (1993), The Helen D. Ling Collection of Chinese Ceramics (1995), Double Beauty: Qing Dynasty Couplets from the Lechangzai Xuan Collection (with Peter Sturman) (2003), The Inner Landscape: The Films and Paintings of Gao Xingjian (2013), and Lo Ch’ing: A Contemporary Chinese Poet-Painter (2018).

His edited books include Dangdai Taiwan huihua wenxuan, 1945-1990 [Essays on Painting in Taiwan, 1945-1990] (1991), Taiwan shijue wenhua [Visual Culture in Taiwan] (1995), Discovering Chinese Painting (2006), Visual Culture in Shanghai: 1850s-1930s (2007), Perspectives on Connoisseurship of Chinese Painting (2008), Stones from Other Mountains: Chinese Painting Studies in Postwar America (2009), Zhongguo yishu zhi tezhi (2012), Contemporary Chinese Art and Film: Theory Applied and Resisted (2013), Chinese Calligraphy and Painting Studies: New Perspectives (2020).

His writings have appeared in a broad spectrum of publications, including Art Journal, Asian Culture Quarterly, Chinese Culture Quarterly, Chinese Studies, National Palace Museum Bulletin, National Palace Museum Research Quarterly, Orientations, China Quarterly, China Review International, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Asian and African
Studies, and Ars Orientalis. He has been the evaluator of manuscripts for academic publishers such as University of Washington Press, Duke University Press, Mayfield Publishing, Prentice-Hall, University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, University of California Press, University of Hawaii Press, Stanford University Press, Leuven
University Press (Belgium), Bloomsbury (UK), Brill (Leiden), International institute for Asian Studies (Leiden), and Routledge (UK), and for such journals as Religions, The Senses and Society, Imago Musicae (US), Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (US), Acta Universitatis Carolinae-Orientalia Pragensia (Prague), Far Eastern History (Australia), Art
Journal (US), Art History (UK), Art Bulletin (US), Journal of Art Historiography (UK), Journal of Royal Asiatic Society of Britain and Ireland (UK), Frontiers of History in China (China), National Palace Museum Research Quarterly, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Twentieth-Century China, Modern China: An International Journal of History and Social Science (US), Journal of Curatorial Studies (UK), Ming Qing Yanjiu (Italy), Philosophy East and West (US), Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

He has received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two Stoddard Fellowships in Asian Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, two fellowships from the J. D. Rockefeller III Fund, and many other scholastic honors. In 1991–92, he received the Lilly Fellowship for teaching excellence at the University of Maryland. In 1992–93 he organized and directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for College Teachers on “The Art of Imperial China.” From 1993 to 1998, he undertook the study of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century art of Shanghai, a research project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation that combined the work of six scholars from China and six from the United States. He directed the Summer Institute of Connoisseurship in Chinese Calligraphy and Painting from
2001 to 2003, and organized the conference on Chinese Calligraphy and Painting Studies in Postwar America in 2018, all funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. In 2011, he delivered “Beauty and Happiness: Chinese Perspective” in the Darwin College Lectures series, Cambridge University; the lecture was revised and published by Cambridge University Press. He currently serves on the International Advisory Board of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and the Editorial Board of the book series Philosophy of Film, published by Brill (Leiden and Boston).