Xinyue Lulu Yuan

Xinyue Lulu Yuan is Assistant Professor of Asian Art, Design, and Material Culture in the History of Art and Design Department at Pratt Institute. Working at the intersection of art history, Asian studies, book history, histories of photography, and media studies, she researches twentieth-century Chinese arts through transcultural and transmedial lenses. Her study is driven by a desire to explore alternative archives and grassroots cultural practices that have been marginalized by existing museum institutions and art-historical canons.

She is currently at work on her first book, Fugitive Materials: Worlding Modern Chinese Artists’ Wartime Books, 1937-1945. It sheds light on how a tenacious group of refugee artists—who pioneered the fusion of modern art and commercial print media in prewar Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s—persisted in experimenting with the medium of the industrially produced book to make the multivalent experiences of violence legible to transnational readers during China’s Second World War (1937-1945). Unraveling the symbiosis between modern Chinese artists’ wartime bookmaking and global visual cultures across media, this project argues that the legibility of global conflict operates as a relational learning process among transnational audiences. It contributes a critical transnational framework for studying art and media in China’s Second World War. On the one hand, it complicates the monolithic national scope of Chinese art history and China studies. On the other hand, it challenges the techno-centric history and theory of WWII and media, which privilege the technologically advanced point of view over those of their low-tech adversaries in the asymmetry of military and media technologies. This research has been supported by the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the Hoover Institution, among others. Her new research project, Redefining China Pop, highlights the approach of feminist ethnography and shifts the focus away from Chinese pop art championed by the Western art market toward vernacular photography, spatial practices, and dance culture among local communities from the 1980s to the new millennium.

Yuan’s teaching strives to make the discipline of art history accessible and to nurture students’ open-mindedness and critical skills for engaging with transcultural visual materials. At Pratt, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses such as “Asian Art and Culture in Global Perspective” and “Art Historical Theory and Methodology.”

In addition to her research and teaching, Yuan undertakes curatorial and creative work related to contemporary artist book, poetry, and performance. Her curatorial, directing, and choreography projects include Natural Language: Contemporary Book Art (2024), Wild Grass: Contemporary East Asian Artists Books (2020), Cultural Resonances in Contemporary Bodies (2018), A Floating Garden (2014), and Cassandra (2013).

Ph.D., University of California, Irvine

M.A., University of London

B.A., Sun Yat-sen University

“Vengeance Aesthetics: Type in the 1938 photobook Records of the Japanese Army’s Atrocities,” in Trans Asia Photography Review 14, no. 1 (Spring 2024).

“The Politics of Floating: Space and Experiences in G. Prat Photograph Album of China and Japan, 1874-1900,” in Diverse Voices in Photographic Albums: “These are our Stories,” edited by Mary Trent and Kris Belden-Adams, 148-163. New York: Routledge, 2022.