Wenyi Qian

PhD Candidate (she/her)
wenyi.qian@mail.utoronto.ca

Campus

  • Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Fields of Study

  • Early Modern
  • Eco-Art
  • European
  • Mediterranean
  • Post-colonialism/Decolonization

Areas of Interest

  • Art and Material Culture of the Early Modern Italy and the Mediterranean
  • Materiality, Craft Knowledge and the Environment
  • Material Culture of Colonialism, Slavery, and Empire
  • Ornament, Kinaesthesia, and Space

Working Dissertation

Title

Empire Writ Small: The Art of Inlaid Tables in Early Modern Italy, 1550s-1660s

Supervisors

Philip Sohm

Description

Drawing on material culture studies, history of science, environmental humanities, and critical historiographies of slavery and empire, this dissertation argues that through a global extractive and mercantile infrastructure of material procurement, a hierarchical organization of artisanal labor that latched onto the Mediterranean institution of galley slavery, and the real spatial affordance of mobile aerial views, inlaid tables made of multi-colored precious stones in early modern Italy rescaled imperial aspiration towards natural resources and territorial conquests for elite interiors and facilitated the creation of early modern imperial subjects during violent colonization and slave trade in the Atlantic world. Within this overall picture, I center the differentially managed artisans and their material practices as crucial mediators that rearticulated the material conditions of European imperial and colonial expansion into palpable object genres. It is by making—crafting—empire into small-scale actionable spaces of mobile, interpersonal and aerial table-viewing, I argue, that an anthropocentric visual and spatial orientation towards empire, territory, and nature’s myriad creatures were forged in early modernity. The thesis identifies the artisanal operations of abrasion, design transfer, refraction, and assemblage in hardstone inlay and unpacks their socio-political valences and visual-material effects. Intricate object-based case studies highlight inlaid tables as intersubjective "small spaces" of early modern empires within which imperial subjects co-produced one another through controlled movement, visual and positional vantage, and hierarchical interactions. Long neglected by scholars, inlaid tables as empire writ small are central to histories of early modern political, intellectual and cultural life and genealogies of ecological imperialism.

Biography

Wenyi Qian is PhD candidate in art and material culture of early modern Southern Europe and its global contact zones at University of Toronto. She has a particular interest in materiality, artisanal labour and their transcultural and ecological entanglements within and beyond the Mediterranean. Her work on both early modern material culture and global art historiography has appeared or is forthcoming in History of Humanities and West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History and Material Culture. She held curatorial fellowship in art institutions in the United States and China. Her research has been supported by Connaught International Scholarship, British School at Rome, Bibliotheca Hertziana, and Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz among others. Her published translations include Wu Hung's Space in Art History (2018, Chinese to English) and Victor Stoichita's L'Instauration du tableau: métapeinture à l'aube des temps modernes (2025, French to Chinese). She received her BA in History of Art with Material Studies (2014) and MA in History of Art (2015) from University College London.

Selected Publications

  • “Provisioning Ornament: Modular Imagination, Paper and the Artisanal Ecology of Early Modern Inlaid Table Design.” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture (Forthcoming in Fall 2026).
  • “Translation as Repoliticization: Thinking with Gombrich (and Popper) in Post-Mao China,” History of Humanities, Vol 10, No. 1, 2025, pp. 209-32.
  • “Remaking Art Histories,” Review of Marjolijn Bol, The Varnish and the Glaze (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023) and Andrew James Hamilton, The Royal Inca Tunic (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2024), Art History, Volume 48, Issue 1, 2025, pp. 201-7.
  • “Dialogic art history,” Review of Vessels: The Object as Container (2019), Conditions of Visibility (2019), Figurines: Figuration and the Sense of Scale (2020), Landscape and Space: Comparative Perspectives from Chinese, Mesoamerican, Ancient Greek, and Roman Art (2021), Visual Conversations in Art and Archaeology Series, Oxford University Press, Journal of Art Historiography 29, December 2023, 14 pp. (https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2023/08/qian.pdf).

Education

MA (Distinction), University College London, History of Art
BA (First Class Honours), University College London, History of Art with Material Studies

Presentations

"Scaling Industries at the Margins: Artisans, Industrial Knowledge, and the Ingenious Shards of Hardstone Inlay" Renaissance Society of America, San Francisco, February 19-21, 2026.
“The Fiery Inlay: Color, Ornament and the Mediation of Ecological Contingencies in Seventeenth Century Southern Italian Church Interiors” Sacred Space: Conflicts and Convergences, University of Toronto, Trinity College, November 19-20, 2025 (forthcoming).
“Kinaesthesia as Territorial Politics: A Spatial Reading of the Livorno Port Tabletop at Uffizi” Baroque Times: The Table’s Scenography, Vila Nova de Foz Côa, Portugal, November 14-6, 2024.
“Layered Refractions: Crafting Lithic Translucency in Early Modern Hardstone Inlay” Craft and Crafting in the Early Modern World, USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, Los Angeles, May 3-4, 2024.
“Slithering through Cracks and Scrolls: (Un)Making Lithic Nature in an Early Seventeenth Century Inlaid Table”, Ecologies of Decay and Regeneration in Art, Literature and Science I, Renaissance Society of America, Chicago, March 21-24, 2024.

Cohort

  • 2019-2020