Stephanie Hueon Tung, Byrne Family Curator of Photography

Stephanie Tung leads the interpretation and presentation of the museum’s growing photography collection, which spans the 19th century through today. A specialist in the history of photography of China, her research focuses on transnational art exchanges, global modernism, translation studies, and notions of artistic labor.

Formerly serving as PEM’s Assistant Curator and then Associate Curator with a focus on photography, Tung was instrumental in shepherding the 2020 acquisition of approximately 1,600 photographs by artists with ties to East Asia, a gift made possible through the generosity of the Joy of Giving Something Foundation. Tung served as the Assistant Curator on PEM’s 2019–20 exhibition, A Lasting Memento: John Thomson’s Photographs Along the River Min, and co-curated PEM’s highly-anticipated exhibition Power and Perspective: Early Photography in China, which opened in September 2022. Currently, she is serving as co-curator of After Hope: Videos of Resistance, which opened in March 2023, and lead curator for As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic, which opened June 17, 2023.

Prior to joining PEM in 2018, Tung worked at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, China, as a curator and director of international affairs. She has published widely on photography and contemporary art from China, as a contributor to Aperture and the Trans-Asia Photography Review and contributing author to The Chinese Photobook (Aperture, 2015) and Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World (Guggenheim, 2017). Her most recent book, Ai Weiwei: Beijing 1993–2003 (MIT Press, 2019), was co-authored with Ai Weiwei and John Tancock and serves as a continuation of Ai Weiwei: New York 1983–1993, for which she also served as lead researcher.

Tung holds a Bachelor of Art in Literature and History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University, and a Masters of Arts in Art & Archeology from Princeton University. This year, she is completing her Ph.D. in Princeton’s Art & Archeology program with her dissertation, Pictorial China: Art Photography in the Republican Era, 1923–1929.

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