Biography:

Shen Kuiyi (b. 1954, Shanghai) is Director of the Chinese Studies Program and Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego.

Shen graduated from Shanghai Normal University in 1978. From 1981 to 1989, he worked in the Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House. He was chief editor of the Art Book Division and Project Director for the series Great Treasures of Chinese Fine Arts. At the press, he was in charge of planning and editing art books and books on art history, theory and criticism, including the 12-volume translation series Twentieth Century Western Art Theory. In 1985 and 1986, Shen worked as an exchange editor at Kodansha in Tokyo. After moving to the United States in 1989, he earned his Ph.D. in Art History at Ohio State University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese art and Sino-Japanese art exchanges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Among Shen's many publications are A Century in Crisis: Tradition and Modernity in the Art of Twentieth Century China (New York, 1998); Word and Meaning: Six Contemporary Chinese Artists (Buffalo, 2000); Shanghai Modern (Munich, 2005); and Arts of Modern China (Berkeley, forthcoming). Shen also maintains an active career as a curator and currently resides in California and Ohio.