Wenyi Qian

PhD Candidate
wenyi.qian@mail.utoronto.ca

Campus

  • Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Fields of Study

  • Early Modern

Areas of Interest

  • Artisan, craft knowledge and technology in early modern Italy
  • Materiality and material agency
  • Ornament and domestic furnishing
  • Scale and mediation
  • Global art historiography

Working Dissertation

Title

Crafting Knowledge, Telling Stones: The Art of Pietre Dure Tables in Early Modern Italy, 1550s–1660s

Supervisors

Philip Sohm

Description

This thesis examines the ways in which the crafting of hardstone inlaid tables in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries acted as an interface between material techniques of diverse artistic media, between disparate epistemic cultures, between aesthetic experience of material surfaces ranging from painting, textile, gem facets to the architectonic, and between far-flung geographies and dissimilar social strata of artisanal labour. Each chapter singles out one technical and material trait of the craft technique--from emery-aided abrasion, drawing, to the translucency of stones and the aesthetics of lithic sampling--to delineate these objects as borne out of the confluence of craft skills, labour administration, environmental processes and material poetics.

Biography

Wenyi Qian is a Ph.D. candidate in art and material culture of early modern Italy. Her dissertation is a cultural history of hard stone inlaid tables in the late Cinquecento and Seicento Italy, centred on the role of artisanal intelligence and the poetics and politics of material techniques. She holds a BA in History of Art with Material Studies and an MA in History of Art from University College London. Prior to entering the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto, she interned at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and worked as a convenor of academic programs at OCAT Institute, Beijing. This latter experience led to her long-standing interest in art historiography, both in its European and transnational contexts, and more recently beyond the intellectual and linguistic backgrounds to include its medial and technological practices. She is also a multi-lingual translator and book reviewer for the academic community back in China. Her translation of Victor I. Stoichita's L'Instauration du tableau: métapeinture à l'aube des temps modernes, as well as an extensive introduction to the Chinese edition, is forthcoming in 2023. Her research has been supported by Ontario Graduate Scholarship, British School at Rome, Biblioteca Hertziana among others. In late 2023, she will be an incoming fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz.

  • "Techne, Materiality and the 'Paracelsian Eye': The Art of Describing in Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany," in New Arts (Xin Meishu), vol.6, 2021, pp. 108-129.
  • “Debates on Kunstwollen in the 1920s and 1960s: An Annotated Bibliography”, in World 3: Art History and the Museum, vol. 4, eds. Wu Hung and Guo Weiqi. Shanghai: Horizon Books, 2021. pp. 164–199. (in Chinese)
  • “Let the Picture Have Its Word: Foucault and the Metapicture in the 1990s”, in World 3: Open Iconology, vol. 2, ed. Huang Zhuan. Beijing: Minzu Art Photograph Publishing House, 2017. pp. 170–192. (in English)

Education

MA (Distinction), University College London, History of Art
BA (First Class Honours), University College London, History of Art with Material Studies

Presentations

"Translation as Repoliticization: Thinking with Gombrich in Post-Mao China", Histories of Humanities X, November 3-5 (forthcoming).
"'Tavolino di gioie': The Mediation of Material Techniques in Late Cinquecento Hardstone Inlaid Tables", "Materiality and Mediation: Global Conversations", October 4, 2022 (forthcoming).
“Abrasive Matters: Smeriglio and the Entangled Labour of Pietre Dure Craftsmanship”, Shaped by Greed: Reflections and Impacts of Environmental Exploitation in European Visual Cultures 1200-1900, Masaryk University, June 8-9, 2023.
“The Artisan’s Share: The Craft of Modular Imagination in Late Cinquecento Drawn Designs of Hardstone Inlaid Tables”, Craft History Workshop, May 18, 2023 (https://crafthistoryworkshop.com/schedule/#spring-2023).

Cohort

  • 2019-2020