[4] In the year of receiving his doctorate, Wu was hired by the Department of Fine Arts of Harvard as an assistant professor.
[3] In 1994, Wu was named as the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History by the University of Chicago.
Major exhibitions he curated include The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China (2019), Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (2004), Tui-Transfiguration: The Image-World of Rong Rong and Inri (2003), and Transience: Experimental Chinese Art at the End of 20th Century (1999), among others.
[3][7] Wu has served as the Adjunct Faculty Curator at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago from 2018 to 2023, and he has also served on the steering committees of art institutions in China including Three Shadows Contemporary Photography Gallery, OCAT Beijing, and the Yuz Museum Shanghai.
[1][3] Wu Hung’s scholarly works on Chinese art center around a broad range of topics and themes.
[2] Different from previous scholarship that focused either on iconographical identification or larger social trends, his dissertation and the first book on the Wu Liang Shrine of the Eastern Han dynasty treated the shrine as an integral object of analysis and revealed the visual logic behind its overall architectural and pictorial program.
[1] Wu’s contributions to the field of Chinese religious art included his discussion of auspicious images and the visual technology of wei (position) in representing invisible deities and souls.
[3] As a graduate student at Harvard University, Wu curated several exhibitions at the Adams House art gallery featuring the work of painters from China including Chen Danqing, Mu Xin, Meng Rulan, Zhang Jianjun, Luo Zhongli, Zhang Hongtu, and others active during this time.
Exhibitions Wu curated from the late 1990s onwards were the product of extensive field research and were developed with the publication of scholarly catalogues that have been instrumental to the emergent subfield of contemporary Chinese art.
[20] The exhibition explored several key themes such as ruins, memory, self-representation, urban space, and temporality that would be central to Wu’s understanding of contemporary Chinese art.
[23][24][25][26][7] In addition to his research-based curatorial work, Wu has led several projects to identify and translate key archival documents pertaining to the development of contemporary Chinese art.