Phillip E. Bloom

As curator of The Huntington's Chinese Garden, Phillip E. Bloom seeks to shape the garden's intellectual and cultural life by interpreting it through tours, lectures, and exhibitions and by enlivening it with public programs, concerts, and an annual artist's residency. He is a specialist in the history of gardens, designed landscapes, and Buddhist art and ritual of China's Song dynasty (960–1279). He received his Ph.D. in Chinese art history from Harvard University in 2013. Prior to joining The Huntington in 2017, he served as assistant professor of East Asian art history at Indiana University, Bloomington, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Tokyo.

Dr. Bloom has curated and co-curated exhibitions introducing the calligraphy of the Chinese Garden, "Garden of Words: The Calligraphy of Liu Fang Yuan", as well as the work of The Huntington's resident artists, "Tang Qingnian: An Offering to Roots." He is currently working on exhibitions that will investigate the design and construction of The Huntington’s Chinese Garden and the experimental functions of scholars’ gardens in premodern China. Several of his recent lectures on Chinese garden history and garden arts can be viewed online: "A Garden of Words: Calligraphy and The Huntington's Chinese Garden," "Potted Scenes: Penjing at The Huntington and in History," and "The Pleasures of Chinese Gardens."

Publications

Transplanting Suzhou: The Huntington's Garden of Flowing Fragrance (Liu Fang Yuan), Orientations (2020)

Reading the Chinese Garden, Huntington Frontiers (2018)

The Mediating Body: Text, Image, and Ritual in the Cave of Perfect Enlightenment at Baodingshan, Dazu, Archives of Asian Art, (2018)

Ghosts in the Mists: The Visual and the Visualized in Chinese Buddhist Art, ca. 1178, The Art Bulletin (2016)