Dr. Wu Hung will deliver the 2025–26 Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture, “Emperor Qianlong’s Peep Boxes: A Case of 18th-century Global Interaction in Art and Visual Culture.”

By focusing on a group of newly discovered visual materials—most notably a pair of peepshow boxes produced in Europe and China, respectively—this talk examines a series of transformations unfolding in eighteenth-century art and visual culture across geographic and cultural boundaries.

Wu Hung is the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago. He is a renowned scholar of both traditional and contemporary Chinese art.

Presented by Cornell’s East Asia Program within the Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Image: Lang Shining, Archery Contest in the Changchunyuan (detail), ca. 1750