Birds & Beasts Lecture Series - Paintings for Visualizing, Venerating, and Remembering the Ancestors in Late Imperial China
Wednesday, April 2, 2025
12:00pm to 1:00pm
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Dr. Cheng is the Senior Curator and Louise Hawley Stone Chair of Chinese Arts at the Royal Ontario Museum and affiliated Faculty with the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Dr. Cheng earned her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She joined the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in 2011 and co-curated Forbidden City: Inside the Court of China's Emperors (2014) and Gods in My Home: Chinese New Year with Ancestor Portraits and Deity Prints (2019). She was the primary contributor to the catalogue for the Berlin exhibition Faces of China: Chinese Portrait Painting of the Ming and Qing Dynasties (2017–18) and co-authored Gods in My Home: Chinese Ancestor Portrait and Popular Prints (2019). Her expertise lies in pre-modern Chinese paintings, including Song dynasty genre paintings, images of women, and ancestor portraits and prints from the late imperial periods. Her recent research explores the ROM's George Leslie Mackay Collection (religious artifacts collected in Taiwan from the late 19th century), the history of early Canadian Chinese collections, and the artistic hybridity in female imagery during the Qing dynasty.