One Hundred Birds Following the Phoenix Calling the Morning Sun, probably 1600-1644 Ming Dynasty,1368-1644 (detail)

Join a panel of curators and historians of Chinese art as they discuss works of art created to encourage a stand against injustice. Panelists include Joy Lidu Yi, Associate Professor and Curator of Chinese Art and Archaeology at Florida International University, Amelia Chau, Adjunct Curator of Asian Art at the Crocker Art Museum, Philip K. Hu, Curator of Asian Art at the St. Louis Art Museum, and Hou-mei Sung, Curator of East Asian Art at the Cincinnati Art Museum. The event is hosted and moderated by Laurie Barnes, the Norton's Elizabeth B. McGraw Curator of Chinese Art.

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Art After Dark / Norton From Home - August

The August edition of Art After Dark celebrates the museum’s collection of Chinese art. Join a panel of curators and historians of Chinese art as they discuss works of art created to encourage a stand against injustice. Panelists include Lidu Yi, Amelia Chau, Philip Hu and Hou-mei Sung, and the event is hosted and moderated by Laurie Barnes, the Norton's Elizabeth B. McGraw Curator of Chinese Art. Haiqiong Deng, a master performer of the traditional Chinese instrument zheng (or guzheng), presents a concert of classical Chinese music. Collection Insights highlight a porcelain tile with a lotus design made 600 years ago during the Xuande reign of the Ming Dynasty.

 Learn more about Art After Dark

To explore more information about the subject matter, works of art, and artists discussed in the panel please download the Information Sheet here. 

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About the Panelists

Philip K. Hu
Curator of Asian Art
Saint Louis Art Museum
Artist: Zheng Sixiao, Ink Orchid, 1306

Philip Hu, the curator of Asian art, curated Conflicts of Interest: Art and War in Modern Japan (2016). Since joining the Museum in 2006, Hu has curated the main exhibitions Power and Glory: Court Arts of China’s Ming Dynasty (2009) and Five Centuries of Japanese Screens: Masterpieces from the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago (2009), as well as numerous rotations of Asian art.

Hu received an undergraduate degree in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley and a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Los Angeles; he subsequently received a graduate degree in Chinese art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where he also completed all the coursework for the doctorate program. He taught at New York University and at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Hou-mei Sung
Curator of East Asian Art
Cincinnati Art Museum
Artist: Qian Xuan, Doves and Pear Blossoms After the Rain, late 1200s

As the curator of Asian art at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Dr. Hou-mei Sung has been sharing her passion for art from Asia since joining the CAM in 2002. Sung's career path has taken her from her native Taiwan to Colorado, Cleveland and eventually to Cincinnati. Dr. Sung received a B.A. in foreign languages and literature and an M.A. in Chinese history, both from the National Taiwan University. She also earned a Ph.D. in museum studies from Case Western Reserve University.

Prior to coming to Cincinnati, Dr. Sung served as research associate at the Cleveland Museum of Art and a variety of research and teaching positions in museum and academic fields in Asia and throughout the United States, including the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan; John Carroll University; Colorado College; Cleveland State University; and Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Sung has organized over ten special exhibitions, including Dressed to Kill: Japanese Arms and Armor and Terracotta Army: Legacy of the First Emperor of China. She has nearly sixty publications, including her recent books Decoded Messages: The Symbolic Language of Chinese Animal Painting and Masterpieces of Japan at the Cincinnati Art Museum

Laurie Barnes
Elizabeth B. McGraw Curator of Chinese Art
Norton Museum of Art
Artwork: One Hundred Birds Following the Phoenix Calling the Morning Sun, probably 1600-1644

Laurie Barnes is Elizabeth B. McGraw Curator of Chinese Art at the Norton Museum of Art (2006-present). From 2006-2020, Ms. Barnes has organized: over 50 thematic rotations in the Chinese galleries and the re-installations of masterworks from the Norton’s Chinese collection (2017 and 2019). Special exhibitions included of High Tea: Glorious Manifestations East and West (2015), Channeling Immortality: Chinese Scholars’ Rocks (2018), Good Fortune to All (2019). Two traveling exhibitions have dealt with the impact of exported Asian ceramics: On the Silk Road and the High Seas: Chinese Ceramics Culture and Commerce (2011) and Silk Road to Clipper Ship: Trade, Changing Markets and East Asian Ceramics (2005). 

Ms. Barnes specializes in Chinese imperial porcelain of the 14th and 15th centuries. She contributed to the following publications: the Yuan dynasty to the Yale University and Beijing Foreign Languages Press volume entitled Chinese Ceramics: From the Paleolithic Period through the Qing Dynasty (2010), the exhibition catalog Royal Taste: The Art of Princely Courts in Fifteenth-Century China (2015), an article on the Norton’s new Chinese Galleries (Orientations magazine, November -December 2018), and an updated entry on the Ming dynasty calligrapher Zhu Yunming (1460-1525, Grove Dictionary of Art online, forthcoming).  During her long friendship with the Jingdezhen Institute of Ceramic Archaeology in China, she raised funds for and headed the establishment of the first conservation laboratory at the site of the Chinese imperial kilns, as well as translating research on some of their most important finds, including an article in Orientations magazine (September 1995).

Joy Lidu Yi
Associate Professor and Curator of Chinese Art and Archaeology
Florida International University
Artist: Xu Bing, Book From the Sky, 1987-1991

Dr. Lidu Yi is a historian of Chinese art and architecture specializing in Chinese visual art and material culture. Yi earned both her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in Canada. Before joining the faculty of the College of Communications, Architecture and The Arts at FIU, she was the visiting Gretta Chambers chair professor at McGill University for two years. Dr. Yi’s research interests are two-fold: Buddhist rock-cut cave-chapel art, architecture and archaeology, and contemporary art in China. Currently, Yi is particularly interested in art, archaeology and liturgy of Buddhist sanctuaries of medieval China. Her book, Yungang: Art, History, Archaeology and Liturgy (Routledge, 2017), is a comprehensive examination of a fifth-century rock-cut cave-chapel complex, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and one of the greatest Buddhist monuments of all timeDr. Yi is also working on a book project, Xu Bing—Background Stories, which explores a series of landscape works by Xu Bing (1955-), a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award and one of the greatest contemporary artists today. Xu began the series in 2004 for the Museum of East Asian Art in Berlin. Most of the paintings in the museum, however, were taken away by the Russian Red Army At the end of World War II. Inspired by the background stories of the paintings, and Chinese traditional masterpieces, Xu made re-creations of them in his “Background Stories” series, which were not made on traditional xuan paper or silk. Rather they were made of recycled material such as dry plants, hemp fibers, crumpled paper and corn husks, which were placed on a frosted glass illuminated from the back. Women artists and art collections in late imperial and early modern China are among her interests as well. Yi is particularly intrigued by the social channels through which paintings by courtesans, concubines and gentry women were circulated, appreciated and collected by the literati, connoisseurs and the court.

Amelia Chau
Adjunct Curator of Asian Art
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento
Artist: Hung Liu, Shoemakers, 1999

Since joining the Crocker Art Museum as Adjunct Curator of Asian Art in 2012, Amelia Kit-Yiu Chau has worked on researching and presenting the Crocker’s growing Asian art collection. Recent acquisitions include Chinese sculpture and funerary ceramics, Japanese woodblock prints and contemporary ceramics, Korean ceramics, and Indian religious sculpture, paintings, and textiles. In 2016, Amelia oversaw the reinstallation of the Crocker’s Asian galleries. She was the in-house curator for the traveling exhibitions Into the Fold: Contemporary Japanese Ceramics from the Horvitz Collection (2017), The Provoke Era: Japanese Photography from the Collection of SFMOMA (2014), and Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami (2012). Prior to joining the Crocker, Amelia was Assistant Curator of Asian Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts in Detroit, Michigan. While at the DIA, she curated the exhibition Points of Departure: Traditional and Contemporary Asian Art (2001) and co-curated the traveling exhibition Kenro Izu: Sacred Places (2008). Amelia holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of California, Riverside, specializing in modern and contemporary Chinese paintings. Currently, she is also Consultant, Chinese Paintings for Bonhams, San Francisco.

A native of Hong Kong, Amelia was exposed to Chinese painting from an early age through the landscape paintings of her uncle Edwin H. K. Chau, an amateur artist whose work integrated east and west, traditional and contemporary in vision and techniques. Amelia has resided in the United States since 1982, and she has continued her interest in the work of 20th- and 21st- century Asian painters navigating the international art arena, including those of the Chinese-French painter Zao Wou-ki (1921-2013) and the Chinese-American artist Hung Liu (b. 1948), and more recently, works by Zhang Shuqi (1900-57) and Si-Chen Yuan (1911-74).