Pinyan Zhu

Pinyan Zhu specializes in Chinese Buddhist visual culture. She received a doctorate in art history from the University of Kansas in 2022. Her dissertation “The Landscape of the Longmen Grottoes: Practices, Repentance, Jeweled Buddhas, and Burials under Emperor Wu Zhao (r. 690-705 CE)” examines the affective relationship between the cliff-carved cave-shrines and the medieval Buddhists in China during the reign of China’s only female monarch. Her research has been supported by Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation and the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies.

Pinyan’s article on the contemporary transformation of Baodingshan, a medieval site of cave-shrine in southwest China, appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Études chinoises. She also published on the reception of East Asian pewterware in Perspectives on a Legacy Collection: Sallie Casey Thayer’s Gift to the University of Kansas. 

Pinyan has taught East Asian visual culture, Buddhist art, and ancient to medieval global art.