Professor Max Tang Xiaobing
Director, Institute of Chinese Studies
Sin Wai Kin Professor of Chinese Humanities
Professor Max Tang Xiaobing obtained his doctoral degree in literature from Duke University in 1991. Before joining CUHK, he taught at a number of universities in the US: the University of Colorado, Boulder, the University of Chicago, the University of Southern California, and finally the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he was Helmut F. Stern Professor of Modern Chinese Studies.
In Fall 2019, Professor Tang was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts. Shortly after, he also began serving as Director of the Institute of Chinese Studies.
Professor Tang’s research and scholarly publications focus on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, visual culture, sound studies, and cultural history. His 2015 book Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts was published in Chinese in 2018 and then in Korean in 2020. The Chinese version was named “One of Ten Best Books of 2018” by The Southern Metropolitan Daily and recognized as the best art publication of the year by the Award of Art China in Beijing in 2019.
More recently, the Chinese version of his 2007 English book Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement was published to much critical acclaim in China. It was named one of the best books published in Shanghai at the Shanghai Book Fair 2026.
Since 2021, Professor Tang has published three volumes of his translations of contemporary American poetry, the latest being How to Be Happy: Poems by Stephen Dunn (2025).
In 2011, Professor Tang curated Multiple Impressions: Contemporary Chinese Woodblock Prints for the University of Michigan Museum of Art. In 2022, he published Dreams toward Home: Endi Poskovic Printworks, a bi-lingual art book with over 120 images in full colour, through the Zhejiang People’s Fine Arts Press.
From late 2021 to early 2022, Professor Tang curated the second season of Break Out, an online poetry reading and dialogue series organized by the Hong Kong Poetry Festival Foundation. The seven episodes of the second season were streamed on Ifeng.com, YouTube, and Facebook, drawing altogether over 2,850,000 viewer hits. Subsequently, Professor Tang was the curator of International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong 2023, which featured the renowned Argentinian poet Diana Bellessi in a series of events that took place in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Hong Kong.
In recent years, Professor Tang oversees the CUHK Artist-in-Residence Programme, which has welcomed prominent artists such as Liu Xiaodong, Forrest Gander, and Jen Shyu to CUHK campus.
Since assuming the deanship, Professor Tang has guided the Faculty through a period of continual growth and transformation, steadily enhancing its global reputation and impact. The latest ranking by The U.S. News and World Report puts CUHK as the 9th Best Global University for Arts and Humanities in the world, a significant rise from a few years ago.
Research Interests
- Modern and contemporary Chinese literature
- Visual culture
- History of art
- Sound studies
- Cultural history
Publications
Books Authored
- Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts. London: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
- Origins of the Chinese Avant-garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
- Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.
- Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
- 《前哨的進行：中國現代木刻運動》(Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement). Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2026.
- 《流動的圖像：當代中國視覺文化再解讀》(Image flows: Re-reading contemporary Chinese visual culture). Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2018.
- 《英雄與凡人的時代：解讀二十世紀》(The age of heroes and commoners: Reading the twentieth century). Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2001.
Books Edited
- Dreams toward Home: Endi Poskovic Printworks. Hangzhou: Zhejiang People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 2022. (Chinese-English bi-lingual art catalogue)
- Multiple Impressions: Contemporary Chinese Woodblock Prints. The University of Michigan Museum of Art, July 16-October 23, 2011. Distributed by the University of Washington Press. (Exhibition catalogue)
- Co-editor with Stephen Snyder. In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996.
- Co-editor with Liu Kang. Politics, Ideology and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
- 《再解讀：大眾文藝與意識形態》(Re-reading: The People’s Literature and Art Movement and Its Ideology) Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Books Translated
- 《怎樣做一個幸福的人：鄧恩詩選》Chinese translation of How to Be Happy: Poems by Stephen Dunn. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2025.
- 《漫無目的的愛：比利·柯林斯詩選》Chinese translation of Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2023.
- 《我深愛我們一起相處的這些夜晚：美國當代詩選》Chinese translation of Speaking of Love: Contemporary American Love Poems. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2021.
- 《後現代主義與文化理論：詹明信(F. Jameson)教授講座》Chinese translation of Postmodernism and Theories of Culture: Lectures by Professor Fredric Jameson. Xi’an: Shaanxi Normal University Press, 1st ed., 1986; Beijing: Peking University Press, 1996.
