About the Tang Center

Dora Ching, executive director of the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art at Princeton University, is a specialist in Chinese painting and calligraphy with particular expertise in Chinese portraiture and Buddhist art of the Silk Road. She has been deeply engaged in book editing and publication, with more than a dozen books to her credit as co-editor or managing editor. She is the author of numerous book chapters and articles and has co-curated three major museum exhibitions. She also occasionally serves as a lecturer at Princeton University; her courses include “Dunhuang: Art and Culture along the Silk Road” and “Portraiture in China.” In 2021 she completed a multiyear project focusing on the Lo Archive of Dunhuang photographs, taken in the Buddhist caves of northwestern China in 1943–44. She published the photographs, a unique, aesthetically refined, and historically invaluable record of cave paintings and sculpture made over a thousand-year period from the 4th to the 14th centuries, along with research essays in a nine-volume publication titled Visualizing Dunhuang: The Lo Archive Photographs of the Mogao and Yulin Caves (2021). In 2023, she was awarded the prestigious Bei Shan Tang Catalogue Prize at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. She has served as study leader for several Princeton Journeys trips:  “Classical China & The Dunhuang Caves” in 2016,  Vietnam & Cambodia: Sacred Sites of Southeast Asia” in 2018, and “Inside Japan” in 2022. Her next trip with Princeton Journeys will be to Bhutan in fall 2024. She received her AB from Harvard University and her PhD from Princeton University.