Celebrating the Career of Cary Y. Liu: Curator, Teacher, Scholar, Mentor

Cary Y. Liu, the Nancy and Peter Lee Curator of Asian Art, retired from the Museum at the end of February after a distinguished thirty-three-year career. A specialist in Chinese architectural history and art history, holding BA, MArch, and PhD degrees from Princeton University, Cary began at the Museum in 1992 on the monumental project of documenting the John B. Elliott Collection of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy. Since then, he has worked on more than forty exhibitions, among them the groundbreaking Recarving China's Past: Art, Archaeology, and Architecture of the "Wu Family Shrines" (2005); Outside In: Chinese × American × Contemporary Art (2009); and Sacred Caves of the Silk Road: Ways of Knowing and Re-creating Dunhuang (2015). His publications have covered subjects ranging from concepts of architectural space in historical Chinese thought to the Yuanming Yuan imperial garden-palace.