Joyce Cheng
Statement
Trained as a historian of modern art, I research and teach the visual arts, poetics, and aesthetic theories of international modernism and avant-gardes. I am the author of The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), a book that examines the question of subjectivity at the intersection of surrealist aesthetic theories and anthropology of the interwar period. My essays and articles on dada, surrealism and primitivism have appeared in journals such as Modernism/modernity, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Gradhiva, and Comparative Literature. I have contributed to edited anthologies such as Cambridge Critical Concepts: Surrealism; The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism; Surrealism: Key Concepts; Neolithic Childhood: Art in a False Present, c. 1930; and Virgin Microbe: New Dada Studies.
As an art historian and humanist, I strive to practice a theoretically rigorous and historically informed scholarship. One persistent theme in my research is the impact of peripheral, marginalized or popular aesthetic forms on professional art and the writing of art history. Informed by the ethnographic dimension of surrealism, I am working on my second book, Learning from Hello Kitty, which takes the Japanese cultural icon Hello Kitty as an object of anthropological aesthetics. I am also developing a subsequent project on self-taught art that deals with habit, technique, and the meaning of automatism.
At the University of Oregon, I offer courses on the history of European and globalizing modern art, and on topics in art theory and criticism such as style, taste, play, work and making. I have supervised student theses and projects on modern arts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I especially welcome working with students who can bring to art historical studies the perspectives of related disciplines such as literary theory, philosophy, anthropology, media and performance studies.
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