Wai-kam Ho, a leading authority of Chinese art, died on December 30, 2004 in Shanghai. He was 80 and lived in Pittsburgh. At the time of his death, Mr. Ho was a guest curator at the Shanghai Museum.
Ho was born on March 26, 1924, in the Guangdong Province of China. He received an undergraduate degree from Lingnan University in 1947 and did graduate work with Chen Yinke, considered the pre-eminent historian of modern China.
In 1950 Professor Chen arranged to send Ho to the United States to study art history; Ho received a joint master's degree in Chinese history and Asian art from Harvard in 1953. From 1959 to 1983, he was curator of Oriental and Chinese art at the Cleveland Museum; from 1984 to 1994 he was Laurence Sickman Curator of Chinese Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo.
Ho's books include Chinese Art Under the Mongols: The Yuan Dynasty, 1279-1368, with Sherman E. Lee (Cleveland Museum, 1968); and The Century of Tung Chi-chang, 1555-1636, with Judith G. Smith, (Nelson-Atkins Museum, 1992).
Ho is survived by his wife, Wai-Ching; a son, Kevin, of Pittsburgh; a daughter, Dawn Ho Delbanco, an art historian at Columbia University who specializes in Chinese painting; a brother and a sister, both of Hong Kong; and three grandchildren. (Source: Margalit Fox, The New York Times, Jan. 1, 2005).