WU Hung was born in Sichuan and received his education at Central Academy of Fine Arts, graduating from it with a bachelor's degree in art history in 1968 and then with a master's degree in 1980. WU received his doctorate in art history and anthropology from Harvard University in 1987.
WU started his career as an art historian at the Palace Museum in Beijing in 1973. Five years later, he immigrated to the United States and held a professorship at Harvard University from 1987 to 1993. Since 1994, WU has held the position of the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and has also served as director of the Center for the Art of East Asia and adjunct curator at the Smart Museum of Art.
WU has published widely on both traditional and contemporary Chinese art. His interest in both traditional and modern/contemporary Chinese art has led him to experiment with different ways to integrate these conventionally separate phases into new kinds of art historical narratives, as he has published in many volumes. Several of his ongoing projects also follow this direction to explore the interrelationship between art medium, pictorial image, and architectural space, the dialectical relationship between absence and presence in Chinese art and visual culture, and the relationship between art discourse and practice.
He is also a renowned international curator and has curated more than 50 exhibitions in the United States, China, and other countries. Most recently, he organized The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China, a major touring exhibition that will be presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (summer 2019), Smart Museum and Wrightwood 659 (winter 2020), Seattle Art Museum (summer 2020), and Peabody-Essex Museum (Fall 2020). The exhibition is the latest in a series of contemporary Chinese projects he organized as a consulting curator at the Smart Museum, most recently Inspired by the Opera: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Video (2014).
WU received the College Art Association’s 2018 Distinguished Scholar award and, in spring 2019, he delivered the 68th Annual A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.