Toying with the Canon: Rethinking Asian Art through Creative Research and Design

Despite their ability to explain the 2025 Super Bowl Halftime Show, break down the feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, or critique a TV series or graphic novel, students often express trepidation about art history. Yet they engage in art historical analysis every day without realizing it. A lack of understanding about what art historians do, combined with gaps in college-level preparedness, makes traditional paper assignments a barrier to engagement in the broad global surveys and Asian art courses I teach.

To address this concern, I utilize daily sketch-and-annotate activities to build confidence in observation before interpretation through drawing and annotating unfamiliar artworks. Course assignments emphasize exploration over argumentation, process over product, and curiosity-driven research over thesis-driven writing. The goal is to demystify art history and develop transferable skills: innovative research and critical visual analysis. Instead of a final paper, students develop project proposals supported by a viewbook of museum objects and archival documents. As part of the pitch for these proposals, students consider how to interpret their topic and communicate that knowledge to the public. Proposals take the form of exhibition concepts or historically grounded toy series designs; both rooted in art historical research and engagement with museum collections. At the end of the course, I organize students into mock selection committees to evaluate proposals and nominate finalists to “fund.” This collaborative process deepens their understanding of the process of art historical research and visual analysis, it reimagines how students engage with the discipline through visual storytelling.