History of Art and Architecture

Feier Ying is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture, specializing in Chinese art history and historiography, with additional training in Islamic art and architecture and Ming-Qing history. Her research focuses on literati painting, travel culture, and regional styles in southern China during the long seventeenth century. She previously served for five years as a curatorial researcher at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she focused on the Wan-go H.C. Weng Collection of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy.

Her proposed dissertation project, Dwelling in the Waterscape: The Kinesthetic Workspace of Late Imperial Chinese Painters, centers on the regional painting styles around Lake Tai in the lower Yangzi River Delta. These styles – often associated with the cultural hubs of Suzhou, Huzhou, Wuxi, and Changzhou – are characterized by refined brushwork, poetic allusions, and a strong emphasis on literati self-fashioning and local identity. Extending this inquiry, the project explores how artists living in this region transformed temporary lodgings and travel hubs into floating studios, elegant gathering spaces, and mobile art markets —closely tied to the aesthetic-literary tradition of the "boat of painting and calligraphy." In these dynamic environments, boats and gardens became intertwined as multi-sensory spaces and integral sites for artistic creation, critical exchange, and the dissemination of painting knowledge. They also functioned as rhetorically interchangeable concepts: gardens were sometimes named after pleasure boats, while boats were referred to as unattached, mobile gardens.

From 2025 to 2026, Feier will hold the June and Simon K.C. Li Fellowship in East Asian Garden and Landscape Studies for a full-year residency at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles. During this time, she will study albums of route and panoramic paintings—a portable format –alongside the broader cultural phenomenon of mobile artistic practice. Her research emphasizes the interconnectedness of the painterly ideals and embodied experience within the artist’s alternative workspaces, foregrounding themes of mobility, fluidity, and holistic artistic production in the water-rich landscapes of southern China.