Author Biography

Fong Wen taught Chinese art history at Princeton from 1954 until his retirement in 1999. He served as chair of the Department of Art and Archaeology from 1970 to 1973, and was designated the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Art History in 1971. In 1959, together with the late Professor Frederick W. Mote, he established at Princeton the nation’s first Ph.D. program in Chinese art and archaeology. With the appointment of Shūjirō Shimada as professor of Japanese art history in 1962, the program was expanded to include Japanese art and archaeology. Since then, the program has granted more than forty Ph.D. degrees. Princeton graduates now hold teaching and curatorial positions in East Asian art on three continents and, along with their own students, constitute as many as three-quarters of the faculty teaching East Asian art history in the United States today. As faculty curator of Asian art at the Princeton University Art Museum, Wen Fong involved his graduate students in path-breaking exhibitions and related publications, and helped to build the museum’s outstanding holdings of Chinese art, most notably the John B. Elliott Collection of Chinese Calligraphy, the finest such collection outside China.