Yoonah Hwang

Yoonah Hwang is Postdoctoral Scholar-Teaching Fellow in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on Buddhist art and material culture in northwestern China, particularly on textile production, rituals, materiality, and artistic practice and exchange during the ninth and tenth centuries. In her dissertation titled “Projecting Wishes on Flying Banners: Materiality and Painted Banners from Cave 17 in Mogao Caves, Dunhuang, China in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries,” she delves into the artistic labor, material qualities, and religious functions of painted banners from the Library Cave. She is currently working on a book manuscript project tentatively titled Sacred Painted Surface: Material Cultures of Painted Banners of Dunhuang. Apart from her academic work, Hwang has also gained professional experience at museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, Korea.

• Ph.D. Art History, University of Southern California, 2021
• MA , Seoul National University, 8/2010
• BA , Yonsei University, 2/2007