WELLESLEY, MASS.- The Davis Museum at Wellesley College announced that Dr. Yuhua Ding has been appointed the Kemper Assistant Curator of Collections, effective August 15, 2022. As an integral member of the curatorial team, Ding will serve as a liaison between the Museum and the academic community at Wellesley College. Ding will also develop and maintain an active schedule of collections-based installations and temporary exhibitions, publications, and programs.

“A specialist in Chinese art who has published extensively in both Chinese and English language publications, Yuhua has taught and curated artworks from across Asia—and indeed the world,” said Amanda Gilvin, the Davis Museum’s Sonja Novak Koerner ’51 Senior Curator of Collections and Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs. “With her simultaneous depth and breadth as a scholar, she will bring important perspectives to the Davis collections, teaching, and exhibitions, especially its Asian art collections. In her years of experience at academic museums, she has proven herself to be an inspiring educator, original curator, and generous collaborator: in short, an ideal Kemper Curator.”

Dr. Ding comes to the Davis from the Harvard Art Museums, where she served as Gregory and Maria Henderson Curatorial Fellow in East Asian Art. In this capacity she conducted scholarship on the Philip Hofer Collection of Chinese art at the Harvard Art Museums, organized rotations of East Asian painting and decorative art galleries, and contributed to the special exhibitions Earthly Delights: 6,000 Years of Asian Ceramics. She also worked to strengthen the museum’s ties to various groups both inside and outside the university community through presentations, art talks, and gallery tours. She previously held a curatorial assistant position at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and curatorial researcher position at Liu Haisu Art Museum in Shanghai. Major exhibitions she organized at the Johnson Museum include Debating Art: Chinese Intellectuals at the Crossroads and Tradition, Transmission, and Transformation in East Asian Art.

Ding received her bachelor’s degree from East China Normal University and her doctoral degree from Cornell University. Her 2019 dissertation, Chamber with Winds and Rains: On the Collecting Practice of Deng Shi and His Contemporaries enriches views of the late Qing national essence scholars and positions their generation as pioneer art promoters and collectors in the framing of our present-day understanding of Chinese art.