Talks
From China to Canada: Untold Stories of the Chinese Art Collection at ROM

Shizi (lion) from China.

Date

Sunday, Mar 8, 2026 14:00

Registration Opens

Monday, Nov 3, 2025 10:00

Location

Level B1,
Eaton Theatre

Admission

Talks - Public: Free Talks - Member: Free

Audience

Adults (19+)
Contact us

About

From the iconic shizi (lions) on Queen’s Park that greet visitors outside the Museum, to remarkable burial treasures from the Tang and Han dynasties housed inside, how did Toronto come to host one of the world’s most significant collections of Chinese art and culture?  

Set against a backdrop of early 20th-century colonial networks and collecting practices, ROM invites visitors to revisit the history of ROM’s China galleries with fresh insight while examining the unique relationship between ROM Founding Director Charles Trick Currelly and British antique dealer and collector George Crofts.

Their impact on the world of Chinese art is significant - their shared ambition to build “the greatest Chinese collection” in Toronto laid the foundation for what would become a cornerstone of a Museum for all Ontarians that continues to celebrate global art and culture. Learn more about the history of this collection, and how it serves to connect both diasporic and global audiences in Toronto and Canada to Chinese history and the legacy of Chinese art.

Featuring illustrated talks by Wen-chien Cheng and Sara Irwin from ROM, and Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Hiromi Kinoshita, join us for an engaging look at the history of 20th century art collecting and scholarship in North America, and how it has changed - and continues to change - in a constantly evolving world.  


Program Partner: Bishop White Committee: Friends of East Asia

 

Speaker

Wen-chien Cheng the Louise Hawley Stone Chair of East Asian Art.
Wen-chien Cheng

Dr. Cheng joined the ROM in October 2011, as the Louise Hawley Stone Chair of East Asian Art. She is an affiliated faculty in the Department of East Asia Studies at the University of Toronto. Her Ph.D. is in the History of Art from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where her specialty was Chinese painting. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the J. Paul Getty Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. Curatorial work, research, and teaching have been the three major parts of her academic training and experience.

Dr. Cheng co-curated the exhibition, The Forbidden City: Inside the Court of China's Emperors, on view from March to September 2014 at ROM and traveling to the Vancouver Art Gallery in October 2014. She was the main contributor to the catalogue accompanying the Berlin 2017-18 exhibit, Faces of China: Chinese Portrait Painting of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. In 2019, she co-curated the ROM original exhibition, Gods in My Home: Chinese New Year with Ancestor Portraits and Deity Prints, and co-authored the accompanying catalogue.

Her major area of research is premodern Chinese painting, including the genre subject of Song dynasty painting, images of women, and ancestor portraits and prints in late imperial periods. Her recent research focuses on the ROM’s George Leslie Mackay Collection (Taiwanese folk religious sculptures), the George Crofts Collection (the formation of ROM’s early Chinese collection), and the artistic hybridity in the female images of the Qing dynasty.

Bio

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These events are offered in English only.