Daisy Yiyou Wang.
The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Mass., has hired Daisy Yiyou Wang as its new curator of Chinese and East Asian Art. She takes up her new post Sept. 9. She replaces Nancy Berliner, who departed in August 2012 to become curator of Chinese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, after serving in that position at PEM since 2000.
Wang is currently a project specialist in Chinese art at the Smithsonian Institution’s Asian museums, the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. She has previously worked at the Shanghai Biennale; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Asia Society Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, both in New York.
Wang recently received a Smithsonian Scholarly Studies Award for her research on Chinese lacquer and on pioneering American collector of Asian art Charles Lang Freer. Her forthcoming books, Charles Lang Freer and Collecting Chinese Art in Twentieth-Century America and The Art and Science of Chinese Lacquer, will be published in 2014 and 2015, respectively.
In a press release, chief curator Lynda Roscoe Hartigan praised Wang’s “exceptional credentials, interdisciplinary approach and collaborative spirit,” calling them “just the ticket for envisioning a fresh approach to Chinese and East Asian art at PEM and beyond.”
Founded in 1799, the PEM recently announced a $200-million, 175,000-square-foot expansion, to be designed by New York-based Ennead Architects. The museum is known for its extensive holdings of Asian and Chinese art, as well as its collections of American, Native American, Oceanic and African art and architecture.
