Collecting China: Missionary Assemblages of a Distant World, 1844–1911
Curated by Sida Chu
With Nancy Li
Pruzan Arts Center, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. Forthcoming in February 2026.
In 1835, just four years after Wesleyan’s founding, its Missionary Lyceum student group resolved that “at some favorable point in China” a Methodist mission be established there. That “favorable point” came soon enough in the 1840s, when opium and gunboats forced China’s doors wide open. Under protections freshly codified by unequal treaties, zealous Wesleyan graduates began arriving along Chinese shores, convinced of a calling to bring forth social change. As Methodist missionaries, they founded schools, opened medical clinics, and preached across cities and provinces. And to generate public interest in and sustain funds for their work, they also sent home thousands of objects that gave shape to how Americans imagined China from afar.
This exhibition invites viewers to encounter China as a nineteenth-century visitor might have in the long-defunct Wesleyan Museum of Natural History (1871–1957), a space once filled with cultural and natural curiosities that University graduates gathered around the globe. After the museum’s closure, these materials were dispersed across various locations on and off campus and remain in storage cabinets until this day. Collecting China presents only a fraction of what the missionary alumni had shipped back from the East. From chopsticks and ladies’ shoes to herbal specimens and a brick off the Great Wall, a majority of objects displayed here are in public view for the first time in over a century. By bringing them back to light, Collecting China revisits Wesleyan’s long but little-known history of engagement with East Asia and places questions of collection and archival practices at its center. Through material assemblages, missionary alumni of the nineteenth century helped produce a knowable “China” that became the basis upon which evangelical Christianity and Western modernity worked to reform, relay, and remake a world across the Pacific.
”Boon Tan” and the Yellow Peril at the PCU
Curated by Sida Chu
Olin Memorial Library, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. May 2023–January 2024.
In the fall of 1972, first-year student Boon Tan from Malaysia never showed up. In his absence, a campus legend was born. Students began doodling a crude face with slanted eyes and a jagged grin—which they called the “Boon”—onto basement walls, stairwells, and rooftops across the University and beyond. Before long, Boon Tan had become part of Wesleyan’s folklore: a visual emblem of the school’s alternative identity, an anchor of belonging in a fragmented community, and, unmistakably, a racialized caricature of “the evil incarnate.”
“Boon Tan” and the Yellow Peril at the PCU turns back to this forgotten chapter in Wesleyan’s history and follows its uneasy afterlives. Drawing on Argus articles, student reports, faculty and alumni correspondence, and archival objects and photographs, it reveals how the widely tolerated campus joke about Boon Tan invoked the “Yellow Peril” trope of its time and ostracized the same people that the University now touts as representatives of its diversity. At this neoliberal moment in our higher education, the exhibition invites meditation on the contradictions inherent in Wesleyan’s self-image as an inclusive, ”politically correct,” institution.
