The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) announces the appointment of Daisy Yiyou Wang, Ph.D., to be its new curator of Chinese and East Asian art. Dr. Wang comes to PEM from the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Specializing in later Chinese art and Chinese contemporary art, Dr. Wang’s most recent research, for which she won a Smithsonian Scholarly Studies Award, focused on Chinese lacquer and on Charles Lang Freer, the pioneering American collector of Asian art.
Dr. Wang’s contributions to exhibitions include work on Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan, and the reinstallation of the Freer Gallery’s ancient Chinese art collection. Among her many publications are Charles Lang Freer and Collecting Chinese Art in Twentieth-Century America, to be published in 2014, and The Art and Science of Chinese Lacquer, coming in 2015. Between 2000 and 2009, she worked for the Shanghai Biennale, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Asia Society Museum in New York.
As chair of the China Program Committee of the American Alliance of Museums, Dr. Wang founded the largest annual U.S.-China museum professional exchange program. With the goal of sharing best practices and developing new partnerships, she has brought together more than 500 American and Chinese museum leaders for site visits, lectures, panel discussions and project meetings. In 2013, she led a team to launch the Marketplace, a program for Chinese and North American museums to exchange their traveling exhibition information. Dr. Wang co-directed the Smithsonian and China project, resulting in numerous collaborative projects between the Smithsonian and the Chinese museum community. She guided the Smithsonian’s first fundraising initiative in mainland China, and the production of a dozen prime-time programs by China’s national TV station featuring the Smithsonian’s Chinese art collection. Almost 1 billion people in China viewed these programs.
Dr. Wang’s scholarship and leadership in U.S.-China museum collaboration have earned her a Smithsonian Valuing World Cultures Award, a Smithsonian Post-Doctoral Fellowship and a Getty Museum Leadership Fellowship. She has served as a grant reviewer for the Getty and an advisor to the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Getty Conservation Institute and the Public Diplomacy Programs of the U.S. Department of State. She earned her B.A. in international affairs and law and her M.A. in English language and literature, both from the University of International Relations, in Beijing, and her Ph.D. in art history from Ohio University. Dr. Wang is also a simultaneous interpreter, and the translator of more than 20 art historical articles and books.
More information: Call 866?745?1876 or visit www.pem.org