Overview
Nancy P. Lin is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Visual Studies. She specializes in modern and contemporary Chinese art and architecture with a particular interest in the relationship between art and urbanism. Studying contemporary Chinese art through a transregional perspective, her current book project, Art On-Site: Situating Global Contemporaneity in 1990s China, examines locally situated, yet globally oriented site-based art practices in China during the 1990s and early 2000s. It explores the aesthetic and socio-political stakes for how and why artists during this period began to work “on-site” in everyday urban spaces such as city streets, construction sites, and other unconventional locations. She is also at work on a series of projects exploring the history of performance art in China and East Asia. Incorporating materials from Cornell’s Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-garde Art, this project considers the documentary mediation of performance art and issues surrounding performative action’s (in)visibility, duration, and public impact. She co-curated the exhibition “Between Performance and Documentation: Contemporary Photography and Video from China” at the Johnson Museum of Art in 2023. Her recent publications have been featured in Art Journal, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and other edited volumes and exhibition catalogues.