Lisa Claypool 祁珊立

Professor, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture 

Office: 3-89B Fine Arts Building
(780) 248-1758
claylisa@ualberta.ca

Areas of Teaching and Research

Lisa Claypool 祁珊立 (Ph.D. Stanford University) is a professor, curator, historian, arts blog writer, and editor. She focuses on visual cultures now and a century ago in the pan-Chinese Sinophone world, with close attention to the questions that designs and artworks pose of us. She is fascinated by things that are visual yet mostly not visible, such as glass windows or faintly printed lithographs. Much of her work is about the ethics of vision; despite their seeming invisibility, the pictures and designs she writes about possess the power to shape how we see our world, and often, they do so eco-critically. Her curatorial projects, alongside publications and arts writing, are a form of environmental and social activism.

Recent 2025 projects include: “Palestine Time: Liu Xiaodong’s In Between Palestine and Israel (April 2013)” (Visual Studies); the book Design and Science in Modern China (Routledge); “‘High Prices for Recycling’: Thinking about Art History with Photographer Yao Lu” (De Gruyter); “China’s Feminist Gap: Edges, Nearness, and Distance in Women’s Arts” (positions: asia critique); “City Windows” 城市之窗 (University of Hong Kong Art Museum); “Lunation: The Cold Moon and an Ink Painter in Twentieth Century China” (Archives of Asian Art).

Claypool has curated numerous exhibitions, notably including the popular ecoArt China / 境善境美 (www.ecoartchina.ca). In an effort to make artist’s voices real to Western audiences, she actively publishes translated interviews, including conversations with Feng Mengbo 冯梦波, Zheng Chongbin 郑重宾, Xie Xiaoze 谢晓泽, Yao Lu 姚璐, ao_ao_ing 老妖精, and Bovey Lee, 李宝怡, among others. In her personal blog Staring at the Ceiling, she writes about emerging artists. She edits a new blog for the China field, China Arts Omnibus. 

She is happy to supervise graduate students interested in histories of modern art and art now in China with a focus on intra-cultural visualities; on science, technology, and craft design; and on histories of brush-and-ink painting.

To learn more about Lisa Claypool's research and consult curated digital resources about design and arts in imperial, modern, and contemporary China, visit her website at lisa-claypool.ca.

Lisa Claypool at the Fu Baoshi Memorial Hall in Nanjing 南京傅抱石纪念馆

Biography

MA University of Chicago, 1990; MA University of Oregon, 1994; PhD Stanford University, 2001.

To learn more about Lisa Claypool's research and about arts in imperial, modern, and contemporary China, visit lisa-claypool.ca.