TrAIN

Guest Speaker - Guest Speaker

Professor Stanley Abe has written about Chinese Buddhist art, contemporary Chinese art, Asian American art, and the colonial contexts of art historical knowledge. His book Ordinary Images (University of Chicago Press, 2002) was recipient of the 2003 Shimada Prize for distinguished scholarship in the history of East Asian art. He contributed the essay, “To Avoid the Inscrutable: Abstract Expressionism and the ‘Oriental Mode,’” to Discrepant Abstraction (2006) edited by Kobena Mercer. Abe is currently writing a critical study of how Chinese Buddhist sculpture became a category of fine art during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study will consider the collecting, sale, and movement of objects as well as museum practices, aesthetic theory, and modern forms of knowledge as organized by the disciplines of art history, ethnography, and religious studies. Abe received the Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and has held an appointment as Visiting Fellow, King’s College, Cambridge University.