Yukina Zhang Assistant Professor of Art and Chinese Studies

My journey into art history started with a college research assignment on a “map of the world” from medieval Europe. I was fascinated by the grotesque monsters and the semi-human figures depicted on the margins. Who are they? Who rendered them on the margins of the world and why? What can we see if we choose to put the center of our attention on the margins instead? 

Now, more than a decade later, as my research focus shifted from medieval Europe to medieval Asia, my hope to give the margins the center of my attention stayed. Rooted in the feminist and transcultural approaches in art history, my work explores the construction, negotiation, and deconstruction of identity through art, visual culture, and material culture. In teaching courses on Asian art at Davidson, I explore with students the complexity and plurality of narratives from the design and display of images, objects, and space. I invite students to explore art and cultural history from a global perspective that acknowledges the interconnected networks across geographic and temporal scopes. I am passionate about uncovering with students different ways to intellectually and emotionally interact with art across time and space—ways that help us make sense of the expanding, evolving visual and material world around us. 

My current research project examines the entanglement of art, gender, and power from the visual and material expressions in the husband-and-wife joint burials in 8th-century Chang’an—China’s medieval cosmopolitan metropolis. The research focuses on the diverse media of tomb furnishings, such as sculpture, mural painting, stone carving, and decorative art, to unravel how the living engaged in power negotiation by manipulating the art for the deceased in the name of the social institution of marriage.