Biography
Sizhao Yi is an art historian specializing in Chinese art and material culture of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Her research investigates the ways in which humans have been affectively bound to the material world in and across time; how we have articulated our diverse subjectivities through the things we have made and used; and how artifacts have embodied, shaped, and constructed artistic, intellectual, and cultural discourses. Her book-in-progress, tentatively titled Visual Discourses of Things in Chen Hongshou’s (1598/9-1652) Works, takes the artist’s paintings and prints as an entry point to consider the relationship among image, artifact, text, and thought, as well as that between object and subject.
Yi received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She currently serves as a teaching fellow in the Department of Art History and the College. She was the Rhoades Curatorial Intern and Frankenthaler/Taylor Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago from 2023 to 2024. Before pursuing her doctorate, she studied textile conservation at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Archaeology Institute and worked as a freelance journalist for Quartz.
