cute history

Winnie Won Yin Wong

PhD Candidate
History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art
Department of Architecture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

黃韻然
麻省理工學院建築系 藝術史論及藝術批評 博士研究生

wwinnie (at) mit.edu

Current Research

I am interested in the history and present of modern art in the globalizing frame, with a particular focus on China. My current research interests center around intersections of legal culture, consumer culture and contemporary art. I recently edited an issue of MIT's Thresholds entitled Portability, which examined the transfer of things and ideas across languages, platforms, spaces and cultures. I've also written on Hello Kitty branding and the history of the Museum Store, trademark law and product placement in Hollywood, trade dress law and experience design, the Chinese performance artist Zhao Bandi and the Chinese consumer rights activist Wang Hai. Currently I am studying Dafen village in Shenzhen, China, the world's largest production center for handmade oil paintings. Here, I'm interested in the staging of originality, the global dimensions of the new cultural and creative industries, and the re-skilling of modern art as mass hand-production. This project, entitled After the Copy: China's Dafen Village and the Hand-Painted Art Product, examines the claims to originality sought by Dafen village's painters, officials, and entrepreneurs against the aesthetic politics of Chinese and Western conceptual artists who have turned to Dafen village as a source of readymade paintings.

Recent Publications

The Panda Man and the Anti-Counterfeiting Hero: Art, Activism and the Performance of Appropriation
Forthcoming in positions: east asia cultures critique (Durham: Duke University Press)

New Work: Liu Ding
Interview with Liu Ding, in Art World 9 (Australia: June-July 2009)

The Unskilled Migrant at the Guangzhou Triennial
In (H)Art International 45 (Belgium: December 26, 2008)

Framed Authors: Photography and Conceptual Art from Dafen Village
In Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 7:4 (Taipei: July 2008)

Portability
Editor, Thresholds 34 (Cambridge: MIT, Fall 2007)

Xiao Xiong's Enter and Exit
In Thresholds 34 (Cambridge: MIT, Fall 2007)

The Catalog by Dung Kai-Cheung
In Branded and On Display (Urbana-Champaign: Krannart Art Museum, Fall 2006)
PDFs: Agnes b., Burberry Blue Label, Che, Hello Kitty, ICQ, Miu Miu, Nokia, Prada, and Red Wing (Design by Studio Blue)

The Problem Solvers
Omagiu 4 (Bucharest, Romania: Fall 2006)

Images of the Canon and the Commodity Object: Monet's Umbrella and Hello Kitty's Toaster
In Chicago Art Journal (Chicago: University of Chicago, Spring 2002)