Ching-Ling Wang Appointed Inaugural Nancy Chang Lee Curator of Chinese Art at Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art

Key facts

• Ching-Ling Wang is appointed inaugural Nancy Chang Lee Curator of Chinese Art at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art.
• Wang currently serves as a curator at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and will assume the new post in November.
• He earned a doctorate in East Asian art history from Freie Universität Berlin in 2013 and studied at National Taiwan University in Taipei.
• His research focuses on Chinese literati painting, Ming and Qing court art, Buddhist iconography, and historical Asia-Europe cultural exchanges.
• From 2015 to 2016, he was curator of pre-modern Chinese art at Berlin's Asian Art Museum and managed the Chinese collection at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin.
• He joined the Rijksmuseum in 2016 as curator of East Asian Art.
• Wang has worked on exhibitions in Taiwan, China, Germany, and the Netherlands, including 'Asian Bronze: 4000 Years of Beauty' (2024) at the Rijksmuseum and 'Goddess of Infinite Faces: Special Exhibition on Taiwan's Mazu Faith Culture' (2026) at the National Taiwan History Museum.
• The NMAA's Chinese art holdings comprise approximately 13,000 objects, which Wang aims to make more accessible through cross-disciplinary and international collaboration.
• Nancy Chang Lee, an NMAA patron since 2017, welcomed the appointment, citing Wang's commitment to advance the presentation and appreciation of the museum's Chinese art collection beyond walls and borders.