Established through a grant from Bei Shan Tang Foundation in 2022, the Bei Shan Tang book prizes recognize research in Chinese art history.

Bei Shan Tang Monograph Prize

This award honors an outstanding and innovative sole-authored monograph on Chinese art history of any historical period published in the English language. Monographs published in 2023 are eligible for consideration for the 2025 awards.

Bei Shan Tang Catalogue Prize

This award honors outstanding sole- or co-authored research on Chinese art history of any historical period published in the English language. Catalogues published under the direction of a museum, library, or public or private collection, and exhibition catalogues published in 2023 are eligible for consideration for the 2025 awards.

Prize

$1,000 award for the author(s).

Guidelines for Submission

• Books bearing a copyright date of 2023 will be eligible for the 2025 awards.
• Publishers must complete the book nomination form.
• Each press may nominate a maximum of six books per Bei Shan Tang Prize competition (monographs and catalogues are separate competitions).
• Only publishers may nominate books.
• Upon receipt of a completed nomination form, publishers will be provided with addresses for prize committee members. A copy of each entry, clearly labeled “Bei Shan Tang Book Prize,” must be sent to each member of the committee.

Books published by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc. are ineligible for consideration for prizes administered by the Association for Asian Studies. Employees of the Association are excluded from consideration for AAS book prizes, subventions, and grants. Publishers should check with authors to certify that they are not employed by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 

Deadline

The nomination deadline is June 30, 2024. Nominations will open for submission later in spring 2024.

Bei Shan Tang Prize Committee

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2024 Awards

Monograph Prize Winner and Citation

Juliane Noth, Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting (Harvard University Asia Center)

Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Landscape explores new landscape imagery, its media, and views of the nation at the crossroads of the Nanjing decade. In this important book, Juliane Noth investigates no less than a re-envisioning of China and its national culture through traditional ink painting transfigured by its necessary interactions with global media such as photography, sketching, and printmaking. In close and careful readings of a constellation of interlocking texts such as travel anthologies and albums, literary, art, and art theory journals; exhibition catalogs, sketch albums, and paintings, Noth reveals the transmedial practices required in the conceptual and pictorial terrains merging discourses of art and country, tourism, transportation, and infrastructure. In doing so, the author brilliantly presents a modern nation visually and politically rebuilt through its landscape and representations.

Catalogue Prize Winner and Citation

Karina Corrigan, Stephanie Tung, Bing Wang, and Tingting Xu, Power and Perspective: Early Photography in China (Peabody Essex Museum/Yale University Press)

Power and Perspective: Early Photography in China, edited by Karina H. Corrigan, Stephanie H. Tung, Bing Wang, and Tingting Xu, provides a fresh, sweeping, and rigorous examination of photography’s histories in China, drawing from the unparalleled collections of the Peabody Essex Museum. This catalog investigates early photography in 19th-century China as a series of dynamic encounters, collaborations, and confrontations between imperial and domestic photographers, subjects, narratives, images, objects, and audiences. Copiously illustrated and fiercely historical, Power and Perspective presents a richly compelling and deeply researched survey of its complex subject, thereby opening up new vistas in art-historical scholarship.

Past Awards — Bei Shan Tang Monograph Prize

2023 Aurelia Campbell, What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming; Honorable Mention, Rachel Silberstein, A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing

Past Awards — Bei Shan Tang Catalogue Prize

2023 Dora C.Y. Ching, Visualizing Dunhuang: The Lo Archive Photographs of the Mogao and Yulin Caves