BILLY BESWICK

Contact
Email: william.beswick@ashmus.ox.ac.uk
ORCID: 0000-0002-7904-908X

University of Oxford webpages
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Outreach

Biography

Billy is the Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean. Prior to this he completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford, where his thesis looked at the relationship between contested sovereignty and the politics of representation in art, film, and literature from the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan).

In addition to academic articles, Billy has published a number of translations of contemporary Chinese-language fiction from Taiwan.

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Research

Billy's doctoral research focussed on the representation and self-representation of Tibetans and other minority nationalities in the PRC and the Indigenous Austronesian population in Taiwan. He is currently working on a book project relating to this, as well as an exhibition, and has a number of peer-reviewed articles on the topic at various stages of the publication process.

In addition to this, he is currently working on a project which uses the Ashmolean's collection of Chinese matchboxes as an historical archive for thinking about material culture and factory life in the Cultural Revolution and immediate post-Mao era.

Billy is also developing two further projects. The first is a history of the cultural remediations of Cao Xueqin's 18th-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber. The second is an art-historical exploration of abstraction in Chinese ink painting which aims to demonstrate the possibilities opened up by, but more importantly the inherent limitations imposed upon, the use of AI for contemporary art practice. This latter project builds on work done for the exhibition Pat Suet-Bik Hui and the Three Perfections: Poetry, Calligraphy, Painting, which is currently on display in the Museum's Khoan and Michael Sullivan Gallery for Chinese Painting.