Professor Aileen Tsui Lectures on Whistler’s Art in Tokyo and Beijing

Whistler’s “Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen” was among
the works Professor Tsui explored in her lecture at Sophia University.

Professor Aileen Tsui was recently a guest lecturer at two prestigious universities in Asia, sharing her expertise on the works of American artist James McNeill Whistler.

Tsui, an associate professor of art history at Washington College, delivered a lecture at Sophia University in Tokyo titled “Whister’s Golds: Classicism, Japanism and Modernist Authority.” Her lecture explored Whistler’s fascination with the color, material and metaphorical resonance of gold. From there she examined the artist’s participation in modernist challenges to traditional Western standards for judging the quality and value of art. She also addressed the broader issue of how Whistler’s paintings were affected by his fascination with, and admiration for, Japanese and Chinese art.

Professor Aileen Tsui

At Peking University’s School of Art in Beijing, China, her lecture was titled “Chinese Porcelain and Modern Painting in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Case of James McNeill Whistler’s Art.”

Tsui joined the Washington College faculty in 2004. A graduate of Yale University who earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University, she focuses much of her research and teaching in the areas of British, French and American art of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to delving into Whistler’s career, her specialties include exoticism in visual culture, modernist painting, feminist theories in the visual arts, and the relationship between image and text.