Stephen Whiteman is Professor of the Art and Architecture of China at the Courtauld and Co-Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin.
My research and teaching focuses on the visual and spatial cultures of early modern China in their global contexts, and on the application of computational methods and digital media in the research and publication of art and architectural history. I write about the art, architecture, and landscape in early modern and modern China and Southeast Asia; recent work includes Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe (Washington UP, 2020) and Landscape and Authority in the Early Modern World (Penn UP, 2023), a collection of ten essays published as part of Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture.
I am currently working on several major projects:
My current monograph, Under Heaven and Within the Seas: Mapping China Since 1000 (Reaktion), draws on art history and cultural geography to explore the changing political and cultural stakes of landscape and territory in China from the perspective of a transcultural history of cartography.
With Hedren Sum (National University Singapore), I am developing X-Sheds: An Interactive Art History of Experience, which engages the potential for deep modelling of multi-sensory environments as means for critically reconstructing spatial and sensorial experiences of the past. We are completing production of our first X-Sheds project, The Virtual Mountain Estate (Power), which uses archivally-based virtual reality models to reconstruct the experience of an early eighteenth-century imperial garden.
Finally, working with Sussan Babaie (The Courtauld), I am co-series editor of A Cultural History of Asian Art (Bloomsbury). This six-volume history employs a ‘trans-Asias’ approach to the study of the arts of Asia, seeking to bring local and the transculturally connected into dialogue with one another. The largest such project to be published in English, it also incorporates the Islamic world into a history of the arts of Asia for the first time.
I am the Co-Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin, published by the College Art Association. For questions regarding publishing in The Art Bulletin or to arrange an editorial workshop at your institution, please contact me and my co-editor, Prof Maya Stanfield-Mazzi (University of Florida), at artbulletineic@outlook.com.
I serve as a Trustee of the Association for Art History and an Elected Governor of the Courtauld, and I am an Honorary Associate in the Department of Art History at the University of Sydney.
Research Interests
- Connected histories of art and architecture in early modern China
- Garden and landscape studies in Asia
- Technologies of art and visuality in early modern China
- Mobility and artistic transmission in the Indo-Pacific world
- Digital and computational methods in art and architectural history.
Teaching 2025-2026
On research leave 2025–26.
PhD Supervision
Current
- Ricarda Brosch, “The Intervening Years: Court Painting between Fluorescence, Death and Revolution (1790s-1840s).” The Courtauld Institute of Art (CHASE DTP Scholarship).
- Corrina Ellis, “An Edo-period provincial garden in pictures, poetry and prose: the case of Shukkei-en, Hiroshima.” The Courtauld Institute of Art (CHASE DTP Scholarship/Sasakawa Foundation Scholarship).
- He Junyao, “Imperial Performance: The Pictorial Fiction and Conceptual Reality of Emperor Qianlong’s Costume Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century China.” The Courtauld Institute of Art (Smithsonian Fellowship/Courtauld Scholarship).
- Ji Yi, “Filial Piety in Practice: Empress Dowager Chongqing and Qing Court Arts.” The Courtauld Institute of Art (Courtauld Scholarship).
- Su Wenjie, “Machines of Time, Towers of Knowledge: Miniature Architectural Spaces and the Design of Timepieces in Sino-European Encounters, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Art and Archaeology, Princeton University (Kress Predoctoral Fellowship advisor, 2020–2022; supervisor: Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann [Princeton]).
Recently Completed
- Pu Lan, “Connections in the Making and Meaning of Bhutanese Wall Painting: Tango Utse, 17th–20th century.” The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2023 (co-supervisor, with Christian Luczantis [SOAS]).
- Chen Shuxia, “The Grey Zone: The Emergence of Self-Organised Photography Groups in Post-Mao Beijing, 1977–1988.” Australian Centre on China in the World, Australian National University, 2019 (co-supervisor, with Claire Roberts).
- Minerva Inwald, ‘“Drawing on Each Other’s Strengths to Overcome Each Other’s Weaknesses”: Professional Artists, the Masses, and the Artistic Culture of the People’s Republic, 1962–1974.’ University of Sydney, 2019 (associate supervisor, with Andres Rodriguez).
- Simon S. Y. Soon, “What is Left of Art?” University of Sydney, 2015 (associate supervisor, with Adrian Vickers).
Selected Research
Books
- Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. (On the Brinck Book Award, UNM School of Architecture and Planning, 2022; John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes, 2022; Elisabeth Blaire MacDougall Book Award (Honorable Mention), Society of Architectural Historians, 2022; Best Book Prize (Highly Commended), Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, 2021)
- Longmai: Kangxi di he Bishu shanzhuang 龙脉：康熙帝与避暑山庄. Beijing: Zhongxin chuban jituan, 2021. (Simplified character translation of Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe)
- Thirty-Six Views: The Kangxi Emperor’s Mountain Estate in Poetry and Prints. Washington, DC and Cambridge, MA: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection and Harvard University Press, 2016. With Richard E. Strassberg. (John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, Foundation for Landscape Studies, 2017)
- Floating Time: Chinese Prints, 1954-2002. Sydney: Power Publications, 2016. Edited and co-authored with John Clark, Minerva Inwald, and Bingqing Wei.
Edited Volumes
- Landscape and Authority in the Early Modern World. Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023.
- Port Cities and Landscapes of the Sea. Special issue, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 42.4 (Dec., 2022). Co-edited with Kathleen John-Alder.
- Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, 1945–1990. Singapore and Sydney: National Gallery Singapore and Power Publications, 2018. Co-edited with Sarena Abdullah, Phoebe Scott, and Yvonne Low. (Best Anthology Prize [runner-up], Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, 2019)
- Early Modern Imperial Landscapes. Special issue, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 37.2 (Apr., 2017).
- Asian Art Research in Australia and New Zealand: Past, Present, Future. Special issue, Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art 16.2 (Dec., 2016). Co-edited with Olivier Krischer.
Research collaboratives
- Chinese Global Orders, London School of Economics and Political Science and the British Academy. PIs: Leigh Janco (LSE) and Hasan Karrar (Lahore University of Management Sciences). Funded by the British Academy Global Convening Programme (2023–2025).
- Site and Space in Southeast Asia, University of Sydney, and National Gallery, Singapore. Co-PI, with Mark Ledbury and Adrian Vickers. Funded by the Getty Foundation Connecting Art Histories Initiative (2017–2022).
- Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, University of Sydney, Institute of Technology, Bandung, and National Gallery, Singapore. Co-PI, with Mark Ledbury and Adrian Vickers. Funded by the Getty Foundation Connecting Art Histories Initiative (2014–2016).
Digital anthologies
- Sussan Babaie, Fresco Sam-Sin, and Stephen Whiteman, eds., Trans-Asias: Early Modern Stories from The Courtauld. A collaborative student research project published via Things That Talk. (2020–2023)
Essays and articles
- “Visibility and Distance: Digital Encounters in the (Re-)Construction of Xinjiang’s Carceral Landscape.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 84.1 (2025): 145–151.
- “Beijing and Beyond: Imperial Landscapes and Early Modern Cosmopolitan Rulership in Qing-era Eurasia.” In Stephen J. Campbell and Stephanie Porras, eds., Routledge Companion to the Global Renaissance. London: Routledge, 2024, pp. 677–697.
- “Towards an Ethics of Place: Asian Art in/and Digital Art History.” Ars Orientalis 53 (2023), Article 11.
- “Connective Landscapes: Mobilizing Space in the Transcultural Early Modern.” In S. Whiteman, ed., Landscape and Authority in the Early Modern World. Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023, pp. 1–28.
- “On Uncertain Ground: Lost Landscapes, Digital Mediation, and Site-Based Research at Early Qing Chengde.” International Journal of Digital Humanities 4:1–3 (2023): 5–39.
- “Beyond the Perspectival Paradigm: Early Modern Pictorial Space and Digital Challenges to the Field.” Art Bulletin 103.2 (June, 2021): 8–23.
- “From Upper Camp to Mountain Estate: Recovering Historical Narratives in Qing Imperial Landscapes.” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 33.4 (2013): 249-279. (Society of Architectural Historians (US) Landscape History Essay Prize, 2015)
