Ellen Larson

Biography

Ellen Larson is Associate Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago, specializing in modern and contemporary art from Asia and Asian diasporic art. Larson’s current book project is focused on Chinese video art and exhibition practices from the late 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Larson holds a PhD in contemporary Chinese art from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as master’s degrees in global contemporary art history and modern Chinese history from the University of Pittsburgh and Minzu University of China, Beijing, respectively.

Before joining CAEA as Associate Director, Larson was the Margaret F. Williams Memorial Asian Art Curatorial Fellow, supported by the Asia Foundation and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Larson’s research has been recognized and supported by the US Fulbright Program, the Getty Foundation, the Asia Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Dunhuang Foundation, the Center for Contemporary Art Research in Japan Program, and the University of Chicago’s Provost’s Global Faculty Award.

Publications

“Spectral Ecologies: Post-Industrial Urban Aesthetics in Northern China.” In ARTMargins, special issue, edited by Nancy P. Lin and Iftikhar Dadi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024.

“The Concrete Flux of Cao Fei’s ‘Cosplayers.’” Art+Australia, 2024. https://artandaustralia.com/A_A/p157/the-concrete-flux-of-cao-fei039s-cosplayers.

“‘Blast Off!’: Picturing Utopian Nostalgia in Su Yuhsin’s Blast Furnace No. II.” Arts 12, no. 5 (2023). https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/12/5/191.

“The Future is but a dream: Liu Yujia’s Silk Road Oasis,” in Barbara London, ed., Millennium Journal (Fall/Winter 2022)

“Planetary Futures,” in WAI Think Tank, ed., The Planetary Wretched: Post-Colonial Narrative Architecture (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Loudreaders, 2021)

“Cao Fei’s Nostalgia for the Future,” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, no. 7, vol. 2 (2020)

“Counter-mapping as Display: Unfolding, Revealing, and Concealing Intermediary Spaces,” Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas, no 13, vol. 1 (2020)

“The Map and the Territory,” co-authored with Emi Finkelstein, in Ingrid Schaeffner, ed. Carnegie International, 57th Edition: The Dispatch (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2019)