Ming Tiampo
Professor; Graduate Supervisor (AAH)
- B.A. (Princeton University) M.A. and Ph.D. (Northwestern University)
- Email Ming Tiampo
Ming Tiampo is Full Professor of Art History, co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis, and cross-appointed to the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture. She is a specialist of transnational modernisms, with a particular interest in worlding, global microhistories, circulation, and comparative diasporas. She has published on Japanese modernism, global modernisms, contemporary diasporic art in Canada, the connections between Inuit and Japanese prints, and post-imperial histories of the UK and France.
For the first 15 years of her career, her research was mostly focussed on decentering Modernism from postwar Japan, which she took as a paradigmatic site of global art history, arguing for the fundamental transnationality of modern art in Japan, and of Modernism more broadly. The work she did on the Gutai group as a scholar and as a curator made a case for the group鈥檚 importance in global art history, bringing out their experimental exuberance, theoretical incisiveness, and conscious internationalism. Among many smaller projects, in 2011, she published (University of Chicago Press), which received an Honorable Mention for best book published on Modernism that year from the Robert Motherwell Book Award, and in 2013, she co-curated the AICA-award winning exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Tiampo鈥檚 work on contemporary art in Canada has, since 2008, been concerned with the parallels, entanglements, and conflicts between racialized and Indigenous histories. Her work in this area seeks to complicate dichotomies, and grapples with questions of decolonization, re-worlding, and repair as relational endeavours. In 2008, she co-organized the conference Complicated Entanglements: Rethinking Pluralism in the 21st Century, which culminated in an exhibition at the 杏吧原创 University art Gallery and the Doris McCarthy Gallery in 2009. In 2017, she convened Rethinking Canada 150: Networks and Nodes in Asian Canadian Visual Culture. In 2019, she co-organized the conference Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization which took place alongside 脌badakone: Indigenous. Contemporary. International. at the National Gallery of Canada, and co-authored an essay in the catalogue. In 2022, she published (Art Canada Institute), as well as two further essays on Yoon. She is also a founding member of the Canadian BIPOC Artists Rolodex, an online database which seeks to raise the visibility of BIPOC artists in Canada.
Since 2014, Tiampo has brought together her interests in global art history and diaspora. Her project, Mobile Subjects: Contrapuntal Modernisms (1945-1989) investigates the circulation of artists from the decolonizing world through the colonial and artistic capitals of London and Paris. This tale of two cities considers how these capitals of decolonizing empires functioned as critical meeting places, anti-colonial hubs, and sites of exchange in the decades after World War II due to postwar mass migration. It proposes a new analytical model that sees metropoles not as points of origin or as global training grounds, but as spaces of intersection and flow that allow us to understand the transnational condition of modern art. In 2017, the project received a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, in 2018, a fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art in London (PMC), and in 2023, a SSHRC Insight Grant. Among many presentations on the subject were the lectures at ici Berlin, at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, and a co-publication of some of the project findings as (British Art Studies).
Committed to collective practice as an ethical method for writing responsible and relational global art histories, Tiampo is active in collaborative projects, which she also sees as an engine for enacting social change. In 2005, she co-founded the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis (CTCA), which provides an ecosystem for transnational research and graduate studies at 杏吧原创 University. In 2006, she joined as a founding associate member, and continues to collaborate with the institute on events and publications. In 2018, she co-founded the Transnational and Transcultural Art and Culture Exchange (TrACE) network, which links research centres in transnational and transcultural studies internationally. The following year, she served as co-Principal Investigator for the Trans-Atlantic Platform-funded project (WPC), which is ongoing. This project seeks to shift discourse beyond top-down models of 鈥渋nclusion,鈥 鈥渄iversity,鈥 and other representations of the 鈥済lobal鈥 to enable bottom-up approaches and entangled histories to emerge, opening pathways to decolonize 鈥渦niversal鈥 Western narratives and epistemologies. Tiampo鈥檚 activist work also extends to pedagogical activities. She is currently a member of the six-person editorial collective for Intersecting Modernisms, an ambitious publication that provides a critical survey of modernisms arising in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, their diasporas, and that of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Oceana. She is also a member of the working council for , a discursive platform for the contemporary art of global Asias. Tiampo serves on the advisory boards of the the (ADVA), (TAP), and the Fellowship Program at Art Canada Institute (ACI).
Tiampo鈥檚 teaching is concentrated in five areas: Postwar Japanese Art, Transnational Modernisms, Transnational Theory, Diaspora, and Curatorial Studies. In her teaching, she seeks to provide real-world experiences for her students, be it through exhibitions, visiting lecturers, or hands-on experiences.
Graduate Studies
I supervise students at the MA and PhD levels who are taking transnational and transcultural approaches in the following fields: Japanese modernism, Global modernisms, Diaspora, and Curatorial Studies.
I involve my students in my collaborative research projects as much as possible, and endeavour to foster a community of practice among them. My students have gone on to pursue PhDs at 杏吧原创, McGill, Oxford, Queen鈥檚, UBC, and York; jobs in arts administration at institutions such as CARFAC (Canadian Artists Representation) and Canadian Heritage; curatorial positions and projects at institutions such as the 杏吧原创 University Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Guelph, Karsh-Masson Gallery, Ottawa Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada; teaching at 杏吧原创, Ottawa School of the Photographic Arts, UCLA; and tenure-track/tenured positions at Fordham University, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and York University.
Please get in touch by email if you would like to explore the possibility of working with me.
MA Theses and Major Research Papers Supervised and Co-Supervised:
Defended
- Haruka Toyoda, 鈥Taikyoku-shugi of the Festival Plaza and Tower of the Sun at the 1970 Osaka Expo,鈥 2022.
- Maggie Bryan 鈥淎rt and the Inaka: Yamamoto Kanae and New Conceptions of Modernity in Rural Japan,鈥 2020.
- Eui-Jung McGillis, 鈥淟ocal is Global: Aesthetic Negotiations of a Localilzed Material, Hanji and its Incommensurability,鈥 2016.
- Amy Bruce, 鈥淐ollateral Events at the Venice Biennale: An Examination of the Axel Vervoordt Exhibitions at the Palazzo Fortuny,鈥 2015.
- Cayllan Cassavia, 鈥淐ultural Transplants: Self-fashioned global art historical narratives in the work of Yayoi Kusama and Noriko Shinohara,鈥
- Andrew Gayed, 鈥淣ationalism, Migration, and Exile: The Photographs of Youssef Nabil,鈥 2015
- Rosemary Marland 鈥淭he Uli Sigg Effect,鈥 2009.
- Nicole Neufeld, 鈥淥ur Home and Native Land: Locating Pluralism,鈥 2008 (distinction)
- Asato Ikeda, 鈥淛apan鈥檚 Haunting War Art,鈥 2008.
- Caroline Vanderloo, 鈥淢ulticulturalism in Canadian Art,鈥 2007.
- Crystal Parsons, 鈥淐ontemporary Canadian First Nations Artists and Institutional Critique,鈥2006.
- Carla Taunton, 鈥淎boriginal Performance Art,鈥 2006.
- April Britski, 鈥淭he Edge of Painting: Emma Lake,鈥 2006.
PhD Dissertations Supervised and Co-Supervised in the Cultural Mediations program (ICSLAC):
Defended
- Pansee Atta, 鈥淯nruly Things: How Contestation Shapes the Value of Pharaonic Things,鈥 2022. (Senate Medal)
- Amy Bruce, 鈥淩esistivity in Contemporary Art Biennales,鈥 2021.
- Anna Khimasia 鈥淎t Play in the Archive: Reading Sophie Calle’s Double Game as Autofictional Remains,鈥 2015.
Selected Publications and Presentations
MONGRAPHS
Ming Tiampo, (Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2022).
Ming Tiampo, [Gutai: Challenge from the Margins], translated by Yuko Fujii (Tokyo: Sangensha, 2016).
Ming Tiampo, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).



EXHIBITIONS/EXHIBITION CATALOGUES
Ming Tiampo and Alexandra Munroe eds. . New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2013. Co-curator.
Asato Ikeda and Ming Tiampo. 鈥淭he Transnational History of Japanese Woodblock Prints.鈥 In , edited by Norman Vorano, 13-21. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2011. Curatorial team member and essay co-author.
Ming Tiampo ed. Easthampton: Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, 2009. Curator.
Ming Tiampo and Mizuho Kato eds. Vancouver: The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2004. Co-curator.




EDITED BOOKS
Eva Bentcheva, Annie Jael Kwan, and Ming Tiampo eds. Thinking Collectives/Collective Thinking. Berlin: ici Berlin Press, Forthcoming 2023.
Franziska Koch, Birgit Hopfener and Ming Tiampo eds., Worlding Pedagogies. Berlin: ici Berlin Press, Forthcoming 2023.
Birgit Hopfener and Ming Tiampo eds. Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization. Berlin: ici Berlin Press, Forthcoming 2023.
Asato Ikeda, Aya Louisa McDonald, and Ming Tiampo eds. . Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2013.

EDITED BOOK SERIES
Ming Tiampo ed. Berlin: ici Berlin Press, Ongoing.
FORTHCOMING AND RECENT BOOK CHAPTERS
Ming Tiampo. 鈥淢ultidirectional Avant-Gardes: A Conversation with Vivan Sundaram.鈥 In The Indian Avant-Garde, edited by Brinda Bose. New York and Delhi: Routledge, Forthcoming 2023.
Ming Tiampo. 鈥淒ecolonizing Paris: Global Urban Art History between Diaspora and the Global.鈥 In Companion to French Art, edited by Natalie Adamson and Richard Taws. Wiley Blackwell, Forthcoming 2023.
Ming Tiampo. 鈥淭ransversal Articulations: Decolonial Modernism and the Slade School of Fine Art.鈥 Postwar 鈥 A Global Art History, ca. 1945-1965, edited by Atreyee Gupta and Okwui Enwezor. Durham: Duke University Press, Forthcoming 2023.
Ming Tiampo. 鈥淩eworlding and Repair.鈥 in Andrea Kunard and Ming Tiampo. Jin-me Yoon (G枚ttingen: Steidl Press, 2023).
Ming Tiampo. 鈥淲ho am I here? Diasporic Reflections on Settler Colonialism, Nation and Planet.鈥 In , edited by Zoe Chan and Diana Freundl, 152-169. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. (In English and Korean)
Ming Tiampo. 鈥淓xile, 鈥淭he Awakening of Race Consciousness,鈥 and Anti-Colonial Worldmaking.鈥 In , edited by Stephanie d鈥橝lessandro and Matthew Gale, 168-9. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021..
Birgit Hopfener, Heather Igloliorte, Ruth Phillips, Carmen Robertson, and Ming Tiampo. 鈥淲orld-Making: Indigenous Art and Worlding the Global.鈥 In , edited by Greg Hill et. al., 114-24. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2020.




FORTHCOMING AND RECENT JOURNAL ARTICLES
Birgit Hopfener and Ming Tiampo. “Worlding Global Art Histories,鈥 Texte Zur Kunst, Forthcoming 2023.
Ming Tiampo, 鈥淲orlding Modern Art and its Pedagogies,鈥 2 (February 2023).
Ming Tiampo, 鈥淲hat is radical?鈥 3 (October 2021): 90-94.
Liz Bruchet and Ming Tiampo, 鈥淪lade, London, Asia: Contrapuntal Histories between Imperialism and Decolonization 1945-1989 (Part 1),鈥 British Art Studies 20 (July 2021). .
Liz Bruchet and Ming Tiampo, 鈥淪lade, London, Asia: Animating the Archive (Part 1),鈥 British Art Studies (July 2021).
Ming Tiampo, 鈥淛inny Yu: Don鈥檛 They Ever Stop Migrating?鈥 Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures of the Americas, Vol 4, no. 1-2 (2017): 217-219.
KEYNOTE LECTURES
Ming Tiampo, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, 21 October, 2022.
Ming Tiampo, Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art Annual Lecture, University College London, 4 October, 2022.
Ming Tiampo, Keynote lecture, Globalizing the Avant-Garde, European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies Conference, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2 September, 2022.
Ming Tiampo, Norma U. Lifton Annual Lecture in Art History, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (online), 15 October, 2021.
Margaret Plant Annual Lecture in Art History, Monash University, Melbourne (online), 7 September, 2021.
Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, London (online), 10 November 2020.
Keynote Lecture, Graduate Symposium, The Warehouse, Dallas, November 9, 2018.
ici Berlin, December 9, 2016.