Yu YAN
Research Field: Intra-Asian Art Exchange in the Twentieth Century, Modern Art of South and Southeast Asia, Chinese Art History from the Late Imperial to the Republican Period, VR/AR Digital Curation
YAN Yu is an Associate Professor of Art History and Curation at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History at Harvard (2025-2026). She received her PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and BA from Peking University, and previously held research positions at NYU Shanghai and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
An art historian by training, her research incorporates methodologies from global history into a basis of in-depth visual analysis. Her doctoral dissertation traced the afterlives of ancient epigraphic scripts—the seal and clerical forms—within the academic community of late Qing scholar-officials, demonstrating how this esoteric calligraphic competence, performed in everyday correspondence, diaries, and even medical prescriptions, encoded scholarly distinction, tracing changing perceptions and modern misinterpretations across East Asia.
Her current research examines the experiences of Chinese artists displaced to South and Southeast Asia during World War II and the Cold War, situating their artistic networks and cross-border activities within the intertwined geopolitical currents of wartime Asia. Drawing on archival materials and visual sources from across China, India, and Southeast Asia, her monograph in progress revisits the “civilizational” discourse that animated Asian intellectual circles in the first half of the twentieth century. Two related articles are forthcoming in the Journal of Asian Studies and the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. Her other publications have appeared in Chinese Calligraphy and Literature & Art Studies. She has been invited to give talks at the Harvard University Asia Center, the University of Oxford China Centre, and the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in France. As a curator, she organized a VR exhibition on twentieth-century artistic exchange between China and India, and contributed to several research-based exhibitions at the Art Museum of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
In recent years, she has taught China’s first English-language course on the global history of art at USC-SJTU ICCI and has mentored students to multiple awards in national digital curation competitions. Beyond academic work, she enjoys the peaceful practices of calligraphy and the guqin, an ancient Chinese zither.