The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade

Explores how the function, norms, and meaning of artists’ names in Chinese modernity have been misunderstood.

Challenging contemporary procedures for establishing attribution, chronology, and authenticity in Chinese art, Winnie Wong explores the means, methods, and stakes of recovering the names of an anonymous community of artists. To examine how Western art history has misconstrued and miscategorized names and identities in Chinese art, she looks to conflicting features of modernity: the...