Winnie Wong

Winnie Wong is Professor of Rhetoric(link is external) at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an art historian with a special interest in fakes, forgeries, and counterfeits. Her work explores authorship, property, and likeness through interdisciplinary inquiry, while her research is animated by the global reach of artists in and from the cities of Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. She is the author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade(link is external) (University of Chicago Press, 2014), which was awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize in 2015. She is the co-editor of Learning from Shenzhen(link is external) (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Her forthcoming book is The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Her articles have appeared in Current Anthropology, Law & Literature, Future Anterior, positions: asia critiques, and Journal of Visual Culture, and she has written essays on art for Artforum, Critical Times, M+ Museum of Visual Culture, MMK Frankfurt, Asian Art Museum SF, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Karma Books. Her work has been translated into Portuguese, Romanian, Chinese, and Japanese. Her research has been supported with grants from the Mellon Foundation, ACLS, SSRC, CLIR, Henry Luce Foundation, Harvard Milton Fund, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Winnie graduated as an interdisciplinary Senior Fellow from Dartmouth College, received her SMArchS and PhD from History, Theory + Criticism at MIT(link is external), was elected a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows(link is external). Listen to Winnie discuss her work on the podcasts New Books Network(link is external), BBC The Forum(link is external), and99 Percent Invisible(link is external)