My doctoral research is driven by my particular and consistent interest in the interrelation between the artworld and the reality, especially that in rural China. Contemporary art and museum practice is often considered to be an urban-grounded activity, but it may acquire very different physical and conceptual forms in the rural. In particular, the rural art museum is a hybrid form grown from the urban-rural dynamics against the backdrop of the specific realities in contemporary China.

On this basis, my objective is to explore the process in which the rural art museum—originally as a space for art—becomes a place for local people to engage with in their everyday life, and how it is in turn participating in the local place-making and constructing the rural quotidian. I attempt to examine how the physical museum space is used or transformed by the local residents, and how the concept of the art museum is understood in the local settings. Overall, I hope this research could bring a different perspective of urban-rural relationship in considering the transnational artworld and the expansion of the western museum model into anthropological discourse.

Research interests
Anthropology and/of art, visual and museum anthropology, the artworld and the ‘ethnographic turn’ in contemporary art and curation, urban-rural relation and transformation, multi-sensory or mixed-media methods.