Specializing in Chinese and Japanese art history, Dr. Koon was a fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before taking up her position at the University of Hong Kong. Her research area is Qing paintings, in particular art in early 19th-century Guangdong, including elite ink painting, export art and interregional dynamics between artists, traders, scholars and officials. Her book A Defiant Brush: Su Renshan and the Politics of Painting in Guangdong (2013) examines the work of an unusual artist working at the time of the Opium War. It investigates Guangdong first as a cosmopolitan area where its elite determined a Guangdong identity that fitted into a national narrative then as a place where war leads to questions of what it means to be a socially and morally learned gentleman at this moment of change. Her new project examines issues of copies and replicas as creative acts.