Asian Art

Asian Art

Zoe Kwok

Nancy and Peter Lee Curator of Asian Art

Zoe S. Kwok joined the Art Museum in 2013 and is a specialist in Chinese art history. Her most recent project was the exhibition and publication, The Eternal Feast: Banqueting in Chinese Art from the 10th to the 14th Century (2019). She also served as co-curator for Sacred Caves of the Silk Road: Ways of Knowing and Re-creating Dunhuang (2015) and brought two South Asian exhibitions to Princeton in 2016; Epic Tales from India and Contemporary Stories: Revisiting South Asian Narratives. She has a B.A. in history and art history from Wellesley College, an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, and received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2013. Prior to joining the Art Museum, Kwok was an adjunct visiting professor at Franklin & Marshall College.  She has also worked at the National Palace Museum, Taiwan and was a Fulbright Fellow in China.

Kit Brooks

Curator of Asian Art

Kit Brooks joined the Art Museum in 2024 and is a specialist in Japanese art history. Prior to their appointment, Brooks was the Japan Foundation Assistant Curator of Japanese Art at the National Museum of Asian Art (Smithsonian Institutions, Washington, DC). Their recent projects include the exhibitions Staging the Supernatural: Ghosts and the Theater in Japanese Prints (2024) and Ay-Ō’s Happy Rainbow Hell (2023), the first US museum exhibition dedicated to the psychedelic Japanese Fluxus artist Ay-Ō (b. 1931). Brooks also curated Living Proof: Drawing in Nineteenth Century Japan (2017) at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO, and Uncanny Japan: The Art of Yoshitoshi (2015), at Worcester Museum of Art, MA, among others. Previously, they have held positions at the British Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and the Boston Children’s Museum. Brooks earned their PhD in art history from Harvard University, with a dissertation focused on the materiality of surimono prints in the nineteenth century,  and received an MA from SOAS and a BA from University College London. 

Collection Stories

Story Archive

Scenes in the Entertainment District

Scenes in the Entertainment District

T he Museum recently acquired a pair of magnificent Japanese six-panel folding screens that date to the seventeenth century.
Liu Xiaodong’s The Loafers

Liu Xiaodong’s The Loafers

In partnership with Princeton University’s P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art and in celebration of the Center’s twentieth anniversary, the Museum recently acquired The Loafers by Liu Xiaodong, one of the most prominent social realist...