Feng Schöneweiß

Feng Schöneweiß is a historian of art and energy with expertise in crafted objects and built structures in late- and neo-imperial China. Feng earned his doctorate in East Asian art history with a graduate certificate in transcultural studies at Heidelberg University. His first monograph, titled The Provenance of Monumental Vases: Chinese Porcelain, German Curators, and Global Art History in Dresden since 1700, is forthcoming with De Gruyter. As a postdoctoral scholar in Department “Artifacts, Action, Knowledge,” Feng works on a socioecological history of the lacquer craft, titled “Cutting, Carving, Poisoning: The Social Drama of Lacquer Craft in the Great Ming.” Feng also assists director Dagmar Schäfer in coordinating the project UTMOST. 

Feng’s current research agenda focuses on energy literacy in a planetary history of art and technology. Within this framework, his second book project examines the extraction, consumption, and transition of energy in porcelain manufacture, lacquer craft, residential architecture, and lunar exploration. Feng is a co-PI of the project “Art and Conflict in Times of Climate Change” funded by the British Academy, a member of Energy Research Networks at German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE), and a member of the thematic network “Denk(t)räume – (Re-)Thinking and Doing Futures” at Heidelberg University. 

Before joining the MPIWG, Feng was a postdoctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (4A_Lab). Feng has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Warwick, an Albert-Ottenbacher-Fellowship for Provenance Research at Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, and a doctoral fellowship at the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” in Heidelberg. Feng worked as an assistant curator at Shanghai University Museum and received curatorial training at Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main.