Christine I. Ho
Associate Professor | East Asian Art
Christine I. Ho is associate professor of East Asian art history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in China. She is the author of Drawing from Life: Socialist Painting and Socialist Realism in the People’s Republic of China (University of California, 2020). Her article published in The Art Bulletin, “The People Eat for Free and the Art of Collective Production in Maoist China,” was awarded the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize by the College Art Association. She has also published articles on design and craft history in Archives of Asian Art, Art History, and edited volumes. Forthcoming publications include essays on Liu Jipiao and the Art Deco object; oil realism; and muralism and collectivity in the Sinophone world.
At UMass, she teaches the history of East Asian art broadly. Courses include Art and Visual Culture of East Asia (Art-Hist 116), Buddhist Art (Art Hist-354/654), Chinese Painting (Art-Hist 355/655), Modern Art in East Asia (388/688), and Craft and Design in Japan (Art-Hist 391E/691E). Topics for the graduate seminar in East Asian art (Art-Hist 791G) have included early modern material culture and Transpacific art and artists.
Research Areas
- Chinese art and visual culture
- Modern Asian art
- Modern and contemporary Chinese art
Publications
“Mass muralism and mass creativity,” in Aaron Moore, and Jennifer Altehenger, eds. How Maoism Was Made: Reconstructing China, 1949-1965. Proceedings of the British Academy. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2025.
“Crafting Friendship.” Art History 45, no. 5 (2022): 1016–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12685.
“Design and handicraft,” in Altehenger, Jennifer, and Denise Y. Ho, eds. Material Contradictions in Mao’s China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022.
Drawing from Life: Sketching and Socialist Realism in the People’s Republic of China. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020.
“Murals,” in The Mao Era in Objects. King’s College Digital Lab, 2020.
“In Search of National Decoration: Archaeology and Ethnography in Wartime Chinese Design” Archives of Asian Art 69, no. 2 (2019): 121–54. https://doi.org/10.1215/00666637-7719395
"The People Eat For Free and the Art of Collective Production in Maoist China,” The Art Bulletin 98, no. 3 (2016): 343-372.
Awarded the College Art Association's Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize, 2017
"Writing national art history under the aegis of socialist internationalism: Hu Man and his History of Chinese Art," in Crossing Continents, ed. Geraldine Johnson. (forthcoming)
Courses Recently Taught
- ART-HIST 190B Art and Visual Culture of East Asia
- ART-HIST 354/654 Art of Buddhism
- ART-HIST 355/655 Chinese Painting
- ART-HIST 370 Junior Year Writing
- ART-HIST 388/688 Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art
- ART-HIST 388/688 Tokyo-Shanghai
- ART-HIST 791G Graduate Seminar: Aesthetic Revolutions in Modern Chinese Art
- ART-HIST 791G Graduate Seminar: Import/Export Material Culture in Early Modern East Asia