March 2, 2026
Winnie Wong, an Asian American Research Center faculty affiliate, has published a new book, The Many Names of Anonymity—the first in-depth study of the Chinese artists who painted portraits of European merchants during the 18th- and 19th-century Canton trade. This Berkeley News piece highlights that while people have been collecting these artworks for centuries, Wong's book is the first to bring together all the detective work that has been done by art dealers, collectors, curators, and historians about who these artists actually were and how they came to be painters in Guangzhou.