Rong Lin
PhD Candidate: Mesoamerican art history
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About
Rong Lin is a PhD Candidate of Pre-Columbian art history at UIC. She holds a BA in Art History from Peking University, China, and a MA in Archaeology from University College London. Her research centers on the entanglements of materiality, sensory perception, and embodied experience in Mesoamerican art, with particular attention to the roles of natural materials in processes of making and reception. Her dissertation examines the practices through which vegetal bodies (representations that blur the boundaries between human and plant forms, appearing in pictorial, sculptural, and textual sources) were imagined, made, and enacted in Postclassic Central Mexico. Drawing on sixteenth-century Nahuatl sources, codices, and plant-based objects, she investigates how plants shaped epistemic, ontological, and social life beyond the dual nature/culture divide. She is also interested in the transpacific artistic interactions between Asia and Americas in the colonial period. Prior to entering the program, she interned at the Sackler Museum and Center of Visual Studies at Peking University and OCAT Institute in Beijing.