Profile

Jenny Lin received her MA and PhD in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BA in Architectural Studies and Italian Studies from Brown University. At the University of Oregon, she is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art with Asian Focus and has served as Director of Graduate Studies since 2016. She is committed to interdisciplinary and transnational research, with general interests in the relations between twentieth and twenty-first century art and design praxes and broader social phenomena, such as urbanization, globalization, and decolonization. Her first book, Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture and the fashioning of global Shanghai (Manchester University Press, 2019) intervenes into global contemporary art discourse through a cross-cultural study of art, architecture, fashion, and film created in and about cosmopolitan Shanghai. She is currently working on a new book about transnational contemporary art/fashion exchanges, especially between Chinese and Italian artists, designers, and textile workers. Her articles, criticism, and book chapters have appeared in Art Margins, Shanghai Wenhua/Culture, Frieze, Flash Art, X-TRA, and the anthologies Fandom as Methodology, Companion to Urban Imaginaries, Participatory Urbanisms, and Cities of Light. Her research has been supported by the University of California Pacific Rim Research Fellowship, US Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, Confucius Institute Grants, and Center for Asian and Pacific Studies Grants. Prof. Lin has extensive curatorial and studio experience, having worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and with artists and galleries in Shanghai since the early 2000s. She has curated experimental art and photography shows, and in 2016, published a catalogue for her exhibition, Picturing Global China, which received a Typography Award from Communication Arts Journal. Prof. Lin offers courses in twentieth and twenty-first century art and visual studies, especially within Asian cultural contexts, and in the history of design, curatorial studies, and contemporary art theory. 

Selected Publications

Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture, and the fashioning of global Shanghai (Manchester Universty Press, 2019)

"Friends of Fans of Mao: Researching Art in China's Cultural Revolution," in Fandom as Methodology (Goldsmiths, 2019)

"Beyond East-meets-West: Contemporary Chinese Art and Urban Imaginaries in Cosmopolitan Shanghai," in Companion to Urban Imaginaries (Routledge, 2018)

Picturing Global China (UO White Box, 2016)

"The Shanghai Style: Rountable Discussion with Gu Zheng, Liu Jianhua, and Yang Fudong," in Flash Art (2016) 

"Interview with Charlene Liu,” in The Disjecta Portland 2016 Biennial (Container Corps, 2016)

"Squatting in Non-Spaces: Queering Art and Identity in Global China's Guangzhou," in Participatory Urbanisms (UC Berkeley, 2015)

"China's Bright New World? Dazzling Projections of Global Shanghai," in Cities of Light. Two Centuries of Urban Illumination (Routledge, 2015)

"Seeing a World Apart: Visual Reality in Michelangelo Antonioni's Chung Kuo/Cina," in Art Margins (MIT Press, 2014)

"Neighborhood in Flux: George Maciunas' Loft Cooperatives in SoHo," in Shanghai Wenhua/Culture 4 (2010) (in Chinese)

Selected Courses