Dr Amanda (Xiao) Ju

Amanda (Xiao) Ju is Lecturer in Contemporary Art. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary art from East Asia and its diasporas, particularly their intersections with global socialism, post-socialism, and gender politics. Amanda is currently working on her first book project, tentatively titled Our Common Selves: Gender and Realism in Contemporary Chinese Art, which studies representations of Chinese selfhood from immediately after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests through the early 2000s. Amanda received her Ph.D in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester in 2023. Before Joining UCL in 2024, Amanda was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Free University Berlin, and a pre-doctoral fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Research

Amanda’s research explores contemporary Chinese art from three overlapping areas: global histories of socialist visual culture, transcultural exchanges between China, Japan, Central Asia, and Europe, and practices of feminist historiography. Her book-in-progress, Our Common Selves: Gender and Realism in Contemporary Chinese Art, studies representations of Chinese selfhood from immediately after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests through the early 2000s. It investigates the ways in which artists trained under the programs of socialist realism turned to their experiences with gender to articulate a language of “the self” in the post-Mao period. Delving into an array of artistic objects ranging from the gender-drag performances of Beijing’s “East Village” to academic exhibitions of “women’s art,” and to the unruly, protean body in figurative painting, this book argues that a contemporary sense of the self emerges not from a rupture of socialist experiences, but bearing and reworking socialism’s historical production of the individual in common.

Relatedly, Amanda’s ongoing research studies socialist art pedagogy in Eastern Europe and China, and comparatively with modern and contemporary art schooling in the West. Before joining UCL, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Free University Berlin, working as a member of the European Research Council funded project “Art Academies in China: Global Histories and Institutional Practices.”

Additional research interest includes feminist art and historiography, questions of historical transition and gender transition, as well as Asian diasporic experiences. 

Specialisms

Global contemporary art; international socialist art and post-socialist art; feminisms

Selected Publications

Catalogue Essays:
    
 “Walasse Ting: How to See the World with Warmer Eyes,” in Walasse Ting: Parrot Jungle, Skira, 2023

Reviews:

Book review, Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting, by Yi Gu

 “Most Beloved of Them All: On the Eighth Huayu Youth Award Exhibition,” Heichi Magazine

“Pragmatic Experimentalism: A Review of Society Guidance at Ullens Center for Contemporary Chinese Art,” InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture

Published Interviews:

 “The Somnophile’s Guide to Cinema: An Interview with Jean Ma,” InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 

 Full publications list on RPS Profile.

Teaching and Supervision

Amanda teaches global contemporary art from a trans-regional and cross-disciplinary perspective. Her undergraduate courses include “Art and Mass Culture in Contemporary East Asia” and “What is Asian Feminist Art,” as well as the co-taught course “Methodologies of Art History”.

Contact

Office: G04, 21 Gordon Square
Office Hours: Mondays 12:30-1:30pm and Fridays 1:30-2:30pm (by appointment). Book here.
Email: a.ju@ucl.ac.uk