Winnie Wong is an art historian with a special interest in fakes, forgeries, and counterfeits. Her work explores authorship, property, and likeness through interdisciplinary inquiry, while her research is animated by the global reach of artists in and from the cities of Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. She is the author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (University of Chicago Press, 2014), which was awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize in 2015. She is the co-editor of Learning from Shenzhen (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Her forthcoming book is The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Her articles have appeared in Current Anthropology, Law & Literature, Future Anterior, positions: asia critiques, and Journal of Visual Culture, and she has written essays on art for Artforum, Critical Times, M+ Museum of Visual Culture, MMK Frankfurt, Asian Art Museum SF, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Karma Books. Her work has been translated into Portuguese, Romanian, Chinese, and Japanese. Her research has been supported with grants from the Mellon Foundation, ACLS, SSRC, CLIR, Henry Luce Foundation, Harvard Milton Fund, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Winnie graduated as an interdisciplinary Senior Fellow from Dartmouth College, received her SMArchS and PhD from History, Theory + Criticism at MIT, was elected a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. Listen to Winnie discuss her work on the podcasts New Books Network, BBC The Forum, and 99 Percent Invisible.
Winnie Wong's primary research is on the long history, from 1700 to the present, of Chinese artists who have been vilified as copyists, assembly line painters, or forgers. She retells the stories of these painters, particularly those of the Pearl River Delta region, showing how the myth of Chinese copying is embedded in Western and Chinese aesthetics and law. Exploring these themes more widely, she has also written on architectural copies, book forgery, biogenomics, trade dress, and the artists Zhao Bandi and Matthew Wong. Currently Winnie is researching women forgers, botanical illustrations, and unfinished encyclopedias. Sometimes she inhabits the persona of fictional editors, and is collecting their work in a book of conjectural histories.
At Berkeley, Winnie frequently teaches Theory of the Copy (RHETOR 136), Rhetoric of the Image (RHETOR 137), and Interpretation (RHETOR 20). She welcomes undergrads to apply to work on her research projects as Undergraduate Research Apprentices. She teaches graduate seminars (RHETOR 250) that explore the methodological intersections of art and ethnography, art and law, history of art and history of science, or archival history and speculative fiction. She welcomes PhD students who want to work with her at these methodological intersections, or, on the art, visual culture, and urbanism of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, the many Chinese diasporas, the post-socialist international, or other contexts of overlapping imperialisms.
Education: PhD (History, Theory, and Criticism), MIT
SMArchS, MIT
