Heping Liu ( 劉和平 ) is an associate professor of Asian art history and the current chair of the Art Department. At Wellesley since 1999, he has offered courses of Asian Art, Arts of Japan, Chinese Painting, 20th-Century Chinese Art, Northern Song Painting Academy, and Landscape Painting of China, Korea and Japan.
Born in China and among the first post-Cultural Revolution college students, Professor Liu received his B.A. in English in 1982 from Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages. He came to the United States in 1986 to pursue graduate study in art history, respectively at Southern Methodist University (M.A. 1988), University of California at Berkeley (1988–90), and Yale University (M.A. 1991, M.Phil.1995, Ph.D. 1997). Among his many awards are a graduate assistantship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1987), Starr Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation fellowships and grants from the Asian Cultural Council, New York (1989–93), an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship (1995), an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2002), and several Wellesley faculty research grants.
As a specialist in the art of Northern Song Dynasty China (960–1126), Professor Liu’s major publications include “The Water-Mill and Northern Song Imperial Patronage of Art, Commerce, and Science” in Art Bulletin (2002), “Empress Liu’s Icon of Maitreya: Portraiture and Privacy at the Early Song Court” in Artibus Asiae (2003), and “Juecheng: An Indian Buddhist Monk Painter in Early 11th-Century Chinese Court” in Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology (2007). He is presently completing a chapter for an MIT book on the culture of technology in imperial China (forthcoming 2009).
Professor Liu has presented scholarly papers and been invited to speak at various professional events worldwide, including College Art Association annual conferences (1995, 2000, 2007), the Harvard Fairbank Center (1999, 2001, 2004), the Salzburg Seminar in Austria (1999), the International Congress of Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art in London (2000), Princeton University (2004), the Palace Museum in Beijing (2005), University of Chicago (2006), the National Palace Museum in Taipei (2007), and the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2008).
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Profile last updated: 09/08