Talks

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

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.

Hiromi Kinoshita is the Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Curator of Chinese Art at the Philadelphia Art Museum. She has curated exhibitions ranging from Song dynasty ceramics to Chinese architecture and contemporary works in dialogue with tradition. In 2019, she reinstalled the museum’s Chinese galleries and published the highlights catalogue, Art of China, with an introductory essay that examines how figures such as Langdon Warner and George Crofts shaped the formation of the collection. Committed to making Chinese art accessible to wider audiences, her recent exhibition Mythical Creatures: China and the World explored cultural diversity through artworks from different parts of the world, from the medieval to today.  

Before joining the PMA, Hiromi held positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Royal Academy of Arts; and the British Museum, where she worked on the international loan exhibition of China’s Terracotta Warriors. She received her DPhil in Chinese art and archaeology from the University of Oxford. 

 Sara Irwin is a Departmental Associate in the Department of Art and Culture, China section of the Royal Ontario Museum.  She joined the staff of the ROM in 1970 as a collections specialist for the Asian collections (China, Japan, Korea, South and Southeast Asia). Her main areas of expertise include the Chinese Bronze Age material, aspects of the later Chinese decorative arts, and the ancient Jewish community of Kaifeng, Henan China. She was involved in two major renovations of ROM, three reinstallations of the Chinese collections including the current Chinese Galleries. The computerization of the collection records,  day-to-day maintenance of the collections, cataloguing, research, loans, exhibitions, gifts and general inquiries from the public.

 Since retiring she has curated two exhibitions "Spirit and Utility: Art of Cambodia and Thailand" and "Collecting Asia: The First Fifty Years 1908-1958)".   She is researching the early history of the Chinese collections, going through archival material and the correspondence between Charles Currelly ROM’s first Director, George Crofts and Bishop William White