John Clark

John Clark is Emeritus Professor in Art History at the University of Sydney, where he taught for twenty-one years and held a personal chair in Art History and Theory. He earned a BA from Lancaster University, a Postgraduate Certificate in Fine Art from Croydon College, and a PhD from the University of Sheffield. Elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2013 (FAHA), Clark previously served as an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow. His research specializations include modern and contemporary Asian art, with particular focus on Japanese art since the Meiji period, Chinese academic painting and the avant-garde, modernity in art beyond Euramerica, art in China and Thailand of the 1980s, transcultural positions, Australian-Asian visual exchanges, the worlding of the Asian Modern, Asian artists as long-distance cultural specialists, modernities in art, modern Thai sculpture, modern art in Southeast Asia, and contemporary Indian art overseas.

Clark's influential publications encompass Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai Art of the 1980s and 1990s (Power Publications, Sydney, 2010), which won the Best Art Book Prize from the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand in 2011; Modernities of Chinese Art (Brill, 2010); Modernities of Japanese Art (Brill, 2013); and The Asian Modern, 1850s-1990s (National Gallery of Singapore, 2021). He has produced 28 chapters and essays in edited books, 26 journal articles, 64 reviews, 39 other essays, 6 catalogue essays, 5 interviews, and delivered 50 conferences, presentations, and invited lectures. Clark's scholarship has profoundly shaped the discourse on Asian modernities, offering critical frameworks for understanding non-Euramerican art histories and their global integrations through biennials and transcultural exchanges.

Professional Email: john.clark@sydney.edu.au