As soon as the doors were open between China and the West, Wu Hung applied to the graduate program at Harvard, where his father had studied in the 1930s. Wu Hung wanted to continue his work in art history. "In China we don't really have art history; we only have works of art," explains Wu Hung.

Arriving in the United States in 1980 with no knowledge of English, Wu Hung plunged right into classes in the Anthropolgy Department. "Of course it was a culture shock," he says. "That first year I worked very hard, day and night, to learn the language." Wu Hung eventually elected to write his doctoral thesis on bronze funerary ornaments of the Han Dynasty for an ad hoc committee of members from both the Anthropology and Fine Arts departments.

Wu Hung says he finds the Western style of teaching to be very different from the learning by rote method of China. He explains, "The Chinese education is taking notes. You listen, you take notes, you memorize. Here each person contributes. People raise questions; they argue."

The intellectual atmosphere is also quite a change for Wu Hung. "Here there is an urge to make your knowledge more up to date. There are more chances to challenge arguments," he says.

In the Fine Arts tutorial on Chinese figure painting which he leads, Wu Hung has adopted this method of free discussion and exchange. "Communication is my religion, my ideology," he says. "If I really believe in any one thing, that is it."

Wu Hung, who was also a section leader for Bronze Age China and several Chinese language courses, explains his approach to art: "When looking at an ancient painting, you have to imagine how the people back then regarded it. You have to recreate the atmosphere in which it was first seen."

This year Wu Hung is advising two seniors who are writing theses on contemporary Chinese art--Christopher Storey and Jamie A. Anderson. "Wu Hung is the one person who could really help me with what I'm doing," Anderson says. "Without him, the impetus for Chinese art studies at Harvard would be gone."

"It's one thing to be studying something that's academic and another thing to be studying something that's living," says Storey. "Wu Hung is a Chinese painter and he's a part of a society I'm trying to understand. He makes academics real."

Wu Hung explains that he paints as a release from "too much thinking. I feel sometimes that being a scholar is too rigid, too boring."

His watercolors of the New England countryside have a very Western, Impressionistic feel. Wu Hung says that while in Chinese art each line is essential, with a certain value assigned to each stroke, he himself is more concerned with color than with form.

"Chinese art is the representation of an idea," Wu Hung explains. "In Western art, there is less emphasis on the political attitude of the painter; instead, there is a personal relationship between the viewer and the painting."

According to Wu Hung, Chinese art now is in a transitional stage. He says he feels it's important to encourage young artists, and he has arranged a series of displays of modern Chinese paintings in the Adams House common room in order to stimulate interest in the Asian art scene.

"As an antiquarian who's deeply involved in contemporary culture, Wu Hung has done a great deal to further our understanding of Chinese art," says Rockefeller Professor of Oriental Art John M. Rosenfield.

Wu Hung isn't sure what he'll be doing after he receives his doctorate in January. While he wants to finish writing one or two more books here first, he plans eventually to return to his native country. "I haven't been back in five years and I feel very alienated from China. Everything I know is from The New York Times," he says.

"I hope I can find a way to go back and forth," Wu Hung says. "It's important that there be dialogues between Chinese and Western scholars and it's important that people exchange this kind of scholarship on a regular basis. Otherwise knowledge becomes dated."

But Wu Hung does have some reservations about leaving the U.S. "In China, of course, you have to do a lot of things you don't really want to do--negotiations, bureacracy, meetings. I can't afford the time for that."

"Among Chinese intellectuals, there's an anxiety about time, a feeling that we've already lost too much time. I want to make up for the years I've lost. I really want to use my time well."