Anne Feng

Professor Feng is a historian of Chinese art with specialties in medieval Buddhist art and the Dunhuang Caves. Her research explores the intersections between elemental media such as water and air and their roles in shaping visual and material cultures of China and Central Asia. Her interests include theories of vision and Buddhist meditation, discourses on representational space, landscape aesthetics, and the relationship between art and ecology more broadly.

She is currently writing her new book Aqueous Visions: Water and Buddhist Art in Medieval China, which investigates how Buddhist paradise was imagined through water in medieval China. Using images of the Pure Land—a monumental painting of Amitabha’s realm—this book explores how medieval painters used the properties of water to reimagine space and vision. Focusing on the Dunhuang caves in China’s arid northwest, Aqueous Visions traces the development of a new type of representational space that emerged from evolving attitudes toward hydro-engineering, landscape aesthetics, Buddhist meditation, and transparent materiality in the Tang empire (618–907 CE). Such “aqueous visions”—from the depiction of water to biomorphic patterning—took place when imperial authority was tightly bound with the empire’s waterscapes and canals.

Her writings are featured in Art History, Archives of Asian Art, Artibus Asiae, Journal of Silk Road Studies, and edited volumes on Chinese art and architecture. Her research has been supported by the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowships in China Studies, the Fulbright-IIE Fellowship, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, etc. Before joining Boston University, Anne has also worked at the Palace Museum, Beijing, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and has served as an academic advisor for the Dunhuang Foundation.

Curriculum Vitae

Selected Publications

	“Ecstatic Forms: Air and the Apsarā during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1939–1945).” Art History 47, no. 5 (November 2024): 914–938.
	“Assembling Gods: Nature, Community, and Temple Murals in Southern Shanxi (1300–1700).” Artibus Asiae 83, no. 2 (2023): 127–170.
	“The Imprisoned Queen: Landscape Representation and Pure Land Art in Tang China.” Archives of Asian Art, forthcoming, Spring 2021.
	“Chongdu dunhuang mogaoku 209ku shanshui yu weishengyuan tuxiang 重讀敦煌莫高窟209窟山水與未生怨圖像.” [Rethinking Landscape Imagery and the Ajātaśatru Narrative in Mogao Cave 209]. Sichou zhilu yanjiu jikan 絲綢之路研究集刊 [Journal of Silk Road Studies], 2020, forthcoming.
	“Luminescent Visions: Transparency and Transformation in Medieval China.” Art and Materiality volume by Center for the Art of East Asia and the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, forthcoming.
	Review of Dorothy C. Wong, Buddhist Pilgrim-Monks as Agents of Cultural and Artistic Transmission: The International Buddhist Art Style in East Asia, ca. 645-770, (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2018). CAA reviews, October 25, 2019.
	Review of BuYun Chen, Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China. Seattle: Washington University Press, 2019. Studies in Late Antiquity: A Journal, Summer (2020): 236-239.