Her research investigates the visual culture of late Qing China, with a particular interest in the relationships between image makers, images, and their various audiences. She has published on painting, photography, and advertising in nineteenth-century China. Her current book project focuses on the nineteenth-century Shanghai art world and its interactions with a new urban audience through such channels as painting, illustrated books, portraiture, and the mass media. Her work on photography in China includes the 1997 Asia Society exhibition Picturing Hong Kong: Photography 1855–1910 and an essay on the nineteenth-century Chinese portrait sitter in Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture (Cambridge, 2005).