Professor Max Xiaobing Tang

Professor Max Xiaobing Tang was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts in September 2019. He was also named Sin Wai Kin Professor of Chinese Humanities. Since February 2020, Professor Tang began serving as Director of the Institute of Chinese Studies.

From 2008 to 2019, Professor Tang was Helmut F. Stern Professor of Modern Chinese Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before Michigan, Professor Tang taught at the University of Southern California, the University of Chicago, and the University of Colorado, Boulder, from 1991 to 2008.

Professor Tang’s research and scholarly work focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, visual culture, history of art, sound studies, and cultural politics. His publications include Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford University Press, 1996), Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Duke University Press, 2000), and Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement (University of California Press, 2008). His 2015 book Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts (Cambridge University Press) was published in Chinese in 2018 and then in Korean in 2020. The Chinese version of Visual Culture was named “One of Ten Best Books of 2018” by The Southern Metropolitan Daily and recognized as the best art publication of the year by the Award of Art China (AAC) of Beijing in 2019.

Professor Tang’s Chinese publications include Postmodernism and Theories of Culture: Lectures by Professor Fredric Jameson (Shaanxi Teachers University Press, 1986), Re-reading: The People’s Literature and Art Movement and Its Ideology (Oxford University Press of Hong Kong, 1993), and Speaking of Love: 69 Contemporary American Love Poems (Shanghai Literature and Arts Press, 2021). In 2023, he published, also through the Shanghai Literature and Arts Press, his translation of the American poet Billy Collins’s poetry collection Aimless Love.

In 2011, Professor Tang curated Multiple Impressions: Contemporary Chinese Woodblock Prints for the University of Michigan Museum of Art. In 2022, he published Dreams toward Home: Endi Poskovic Printworks, a bi-lingual art book with over 120 images in full colour, through the Zhejiang People's Fine Arts Press. 

From November 2021 to February 2022, Professor Tang curated the second season of Break Out, an online poetry reading and dialogue series organized by the Hong Kong Poetry Festival Foundation. The seven episodes of the second season were streamed on Ifeng.com, YouTube, and Facebook, drawing altogether over 2,850,000 viewer hits. Subsequently, Professor Tang was the curator of International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong 2023, which featured the renowned Argentinian poet Diana Bellessi in a series of events that took place in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Hong Kong. When streamed in December 2023, the programme drew over 3,080,000 viewer hits worldwide.