Using contemporary art in China as a case study, this dissertation analyzes how artworks and art discourses move between different institutional contexts and are rendered meaningful according to processes of globalization. Employing a media-based approach this project, To Enter Art History: Translating Art History and Canonizing Contemporary Art in Reform Era China (1978-1993), analyzes the circulation of art history in the international art world as read through its reception and translation in China. The dissertation begins asking how art history was imported into China in the 1980s during China's initial period of opening and reform. By considering how artists and art critics responded to these imported texts, I argue that Chinese artists used art history as a readymade, appropriating books, magazines, and printed images as mass-produced, readymade objects in their art practices. Through their appropriations, Chinese artists, including Huang Yong Ping, Lin Jiahua, Xu Bing and Ai Weiwei, challenged not only the dominance of Western art history globally but also its universalist claims. At the same time, these artists began to reconsider the institutions that define and support the arts in China and abroad. Specifically, Chinese artists began to re-conceptualize their relationship to art history and the canonization of art. Despite critics' calls to establish a new canon of contemporary Chinese art, artists actively resisted this canonization. I further analyze how Chinese artists began to participate in the rapidly globalizing art world as their work was increasingly shown in international, perennial exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale. My research demonstrates that the flows of movement that characterized the rapidly globalizing art world in the late 1980s and early 1990s were uneven—art history, theory and criticism were the main imports into China, whereas artworks by Chinese artists were increasingly exhibited in New York and Europe. As a result, the canon of contemporary Chinese art developed differently inside and outside of China. This finding is significant as it proposes alternative and competing ways in which the canon of contemporary art is constructed in the global art world.