Contact
Dr Mingyuan Hu
Research Associate
Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte
Humboldt Universität
Georgenstraße 47
10117 Berlin
Email: hu@bilderfahrzeuge.org
Research project
Moving Book of Changes and Changing Ideas of Science
As 易經 (I Ching / Book of Changes / Das Buch der Wandlungen) from antiquity moved in and out of diverse geopolitical, conceptual, and linguistic spaces, I make an historical study of six moments in its afterlife – in Enlightenment Europe, Tokugawa Japan, Victorian Britain, post-revolutionary China, interwar Germany, and post-war Euro-America; and examine the ways in which a work of divination / cosmology / philosophy – its historiographically layered and ideologically varied interpretations – interacted with specific notions of science corresponding to differing claims of universality, to shifting world orders, and to individual takes on structural change in times of external and internal reconfiguration.
Profile
Research Interests
Art and intellectual histories in Europe and China since c.1850, with foci on interwar and postwar years; historiography and methodology of art history; history of science; philosophy of language.
Academic Background
2015-2017 Lecturer in Art Histories of Asia, University of Leeds
2013-2014 Visiting Scholar, Victoria and Albert Museum
2008-2012 Temporary Lecturer in Art History, University of Glasgow
2014 PhD Literary History, University of Glasgow
2008 MA Hons (1stclass) Art History, University of Glasgow
2008 Herkless Prize, University of Glasgow
2008 Senior Honeyman Prize, University of Glasgow
Publications (selection)
Books
Fou Lei: An Insistence on Truth, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017.
Articles
‘Language and Chinese Art History’ in: Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 21, no. 1 (2021), pp. 41-57.
‘Legal Performance: When Ai Weiwei took Volkswagen to Court’ in: The Times Literary Supplement, 23 Aug., 2019.
‘Translating Art History, Transmitting Humanitas’ in: Migrating Histories of Art: Self-translations of a Discipline, ed. by Maria Teresa Costa and Hans Christian Hönes, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018, pp. 135-148.
‘Elusive Aesthetics or Comparative Politics’ in: The Senses and Society, vol. 13. no. 3 (2018), pp. 295-297.
‘The Antispecialist’ in: Specialism, ed. by David Blamey, London: Open Editions, 2016, pp. 55-66.
‘How the Sage’s Ghost Metamorphoses’ in: Secret Signs: Calligraphy in Chinese Contemporary Art/ Zeitgenössische chinesische Kunst im Namen der Schrift, ed. by Dirk Luckow, Cologne: Snoeck, 2015, pp. 60-71.
Reviews
Grenzgänge: Nord- und Südkoreanische Kunst aus der Sammlung Sigg in: Critique d’Art, November 2021.
Uncooperative Contemporaries: Art Exhibitions in Shanghai in 2000 in: Critique d’Art, June 2021.
A New Thoughtfulness in Contemporary China: Critical Voices in Art and Aesthetics in: Critique d’Art, December 2020.
“Civilité, not laïcité”: review of La langue arabe, trésor de France by Jack Lang in: The Times Literary Supplement, 18 Sept., 2020.
Translations
Chinese to English
Toward Bravery and Other Poems by Mu Xin, London/Berlin: Hermits United, 2017.
English to Chinese
‘John Thomson’s China: 1868–1872’ by Nick Pearce in: China Through the Lens of John Thomson: 1868–1872, London: River Books, 2010, pp. 6-9.
French to Chinese
Fabienne Verdier: la traversée des signes by Daniel Abadie, Hong Kong: Consulat Général de France, 2014.
