Xiaofan (Ruby) Wu

Xiaofan Wu is currently a first-year PhD student at The Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture, Carleton University. Her work focuses on contemporary Chinese art, with a special interest in video, performance, new media, and exhibition history.

She studied Art History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she began with Dutch Golden Age paintings and later shifted focus to contemporary Chinese art. Her B.A. honor thesis is “After Shock: Performance Art in China after 1989.” She received her M.A. in Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she finished her M.A. thesis “At the Crossroads: Video Art in ‘Post-Sense Sensibility: Alien Bodies and Delusion’.”

Xiaofan has interned at various art institutions in China and in the US, including UCCA Edge (Shanghai), Eli Klein Gallery (New York), Long Museum (Shanghai), and Shanghai Museum (Shanghai), where she was involved in exhibition curation and coordination as well as art handling. She has also worked as a freelance translator and finished the English to Chinese translation of “Michelangelo A&I (Art and Ideas)” (2010) by Anthony Hughes.

Selected Conference Presentations:

University of Pittsburgh, 2022 HAA Graduate Symposium, “Virtual Matters: Rethinking Image and Reality in Art History.” Presentation title: “Zhang Peili: A Live Stream that May Last for Years”

Selected Publications:

“‘Whose Utopia’ – Cao Fei at the Museum of Modern Art.” IFAContemporary. February 15, 2021. https://ifacontemporary.org/whose-utopia-cao-fei/