Feng Schöneweiß, Ph.D.

Feng Schöneweiß is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the interdisciplinary 4A Laboratory: Art Histories, Archaeologies, Anthropologies, Aesthetics (September 2023–February 2026). Feng works on the histories of art and energy in transcultural and planetary perspectives, with expertise in late- and neo-imperial Chinese art and architecture. He earned his PhD in East Asian art history with a graduate certificate in transcultural studies from the University of Heidelberg. 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. Feng’s second main project focuses on energy as method in a planetary history of art. Within this analytical framework, his project at the 4A_Lab delves into energy consumption and waste of the porcelain manufacture in Jingdezhen during its early modern period. His ongoing projects include “The Impracticable Dragon Bowls”, “The Ecologies of Lacquer”, “A Geoanthropology of Moon Rocks”, and “Celadon, Gunpowder, and Energy Transition in Song-dynasty China”. From March 2026, Feng will work as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Feng has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick, an Albert-Ottenbacher-Fellowship for Provenance Research at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, and a doctoral fellowship at the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” in Heidelberg. In addition, his research has received generous support from the American Ceramic Circle, the Bei Shan Tang Foundation, the British Academy, the DAAD, the Getty Foundation, the Humboldt Foundation, the universities of Heidelberg and Chicago, among others.

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 Network at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE) in Berlin, and a member of the thematic research network “Denk(t)räume – (Re-)Thinking and Doing Futures” at the University of Heidelberg. Feng worked as an assistant curator at Shanghai University Museum and received curatorial training at Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main.