Biography
Zhiyan Yang is an architectural historian whose research spans the art and cultural history of the built environment in East Asia in the long twentieth century, the intersection of non-Western traditions and modernism, the theory and historiography of Chinese architecture, contemporary art and visual culture in East Asia, and diasporic architecture.
His book-in-progress, Culture in Revolution: Contemporary Chinese Architecture and Its Public Discourse, 1978-2008, draws on a diverse range of built, visual, and textual evidence to explore the cultural shifts in post-Mao Chinese architecture. The agents of this transformation—including architects, critics, scholars, artists, and curators—reinterpreted contemporary architecture as a new locus for meaning making in a rapidly changing society. Yang argues that, in addition to the monumental public projects that symbolized state power or the mass-produced housing designed for a burgeoning market economy, many of these new architectural experiments—initially perceived as alternative and marginal—have critically examined urbanization and inspired new visions for China's future amid market forces, reduced state control, and globalization.
Yang earned a B.A. in Art History from Sarah Lawrence College and completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Last year, he served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and Humanities at Princeton University.