Jeehee Hong

Jeehee Hong researches the material environments of middle-period China (ninth to fourteenth century CE) and teaches various aspects of Chinese and East Asian art. Her research projects are driven by the workings of historically less-visible agents in artmaking.

Her first book, Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000-1400 (2016), offers new approaches for understanding nonelites’ engagement with the longstanding art of funerary monuments, and with material culture more broadly, at the beginning of the second millennium in China. One of the lasting questions from that project—the issue of agency among historically quieted subjects—has been taken up and explored in a collaborative project Affect and Materiality: Emotion in Chinese Art (2025). This new research locates emotion in the expanded field of affect, where traces of the interactions between seemingly passive actants in history and the material world become detectable.

Informed by these earlier investigations, she has been developing three main areas of research: subaltern knowledge and agencies at the intersections of gender, class, ethnicity, or species in premodern Chinese art; the visual episteme of the face as a field of negotiation among social, religious, and visual conventions in the visual arts of middle-period China; and the changing epistemology of sense perception in the material world from the early to middle periods. Her research questions bring together diverse mediums, conceptions, and formal categories of art, often inspired by cross-cultural phenomena in the material world.

Selected Publications:

Books

Articles

“Picturing Equine ‘Other’ and Claims for Individuality in Middle-Period China,” in Don J. Wyatt and Shao-yun Yang eds. Ethnicity and Race in the Medieval World, Volume 2: Ethnicity and Race in Medieval Inner and East Asia (London: Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming)

“Affective Fish,” in Jeehee Hong and Wu Hung eds., Affect and Materiality: Emotion in Chinese Art (Chicago: The Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago; Art Media Resources, 2025)

“Simian Episteme, ca. 1200,” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (Special Issue: Hearing Things), vol. 11, no. 1 (Duke University Press, 2024)

“Le chagrin, la pierre, et l’argile. Images du deuil dans la Chine médiéval” (Tears of Stone and Clay: The Affect of Mourning Images in Middle-Period China), Diogenes, vols. 254-255, no.2 (2016). Translated into Chinese (2018) and English (2022)

“Crafting Boundaries of the Unseeable World: Dialectics of Space in Bhagavat Sutra Repository,” Art History, vol. 40, issue 1 (2017)

“Unwritten Life (and Death) of a “Pharmacist” in Song China: Decoding Hancheng Tomb Murals,” Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, vol. 24 (2015). Co-authored with TJ Hinrichs.

“Mechanism of Life for the Netherworld: Transformations of Mingqi in Middle-Period China,” Journal of Chinese Religions, vol. 43, no. 2 (2015). (Translated into Chinese and published in Yishushi yanjiu (The Study of Art History) vol. 18 (2017)

“Changing Roles of the Tomb Portrait: Burial Practices and Ancestral Worship of Non-Literati Elite in North China (1000-1400),” Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, vol. 44 (2014)

“Exorcism from the Streets to the Tomb: An Image of the Judge and Minions in the Xuanhua Liao Tomb No. 7,” Archives of Asian Art, vol. 63, no. 1 (2013)

“Virtual Theater of the Dead: Actor Figurines and Their Stage in Houma Tomb No.1, Shanxi Province,” Artibus Asiae, vol. 71, no. 1, (2011)

“Theatricalizing Death and Society in The Skeletons’ Illusory Performance by Li Song,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 93, no. 1 (March 2011)