CAA was the first in China to establish an art history major and the first to enroll postgraduate students majoring in art history. This sub-discipline integrates Chinese and foreign art history with art theory, carrying out teaching and research in light of form, style, concept, interest, history, society and more. By grasping the overall academic development pattern of art history research through systematic translation and intensive reading of the world's art history classics, it helps students enhance their disciplinary understanding and theoretical awareness, striving to return to the classical academic quality featuring humanist spirits from a modern perspective.

This sub-discipline aims to guide students to grasp important artistic concepts and different study methods in history, guide them to get the essence of the discipline by reading original classics, and cultivate their awareness to raise questions to constantly test the way their predecessors and themselves think and write the history of visual art. By exploring classic wisdom and based on Chinese art history, it creatively integrates ancient and modern Chinese and foreign academic resources and provides new ideological and methodological perspectives for enriching the study of world art, thus establishing new ideas, new creation theories, and new criticism theories with "artistic intelligence" as the core.

CAA is the first in China to accept postgraduate and doctoral students majoring in visual culture research and the first to carry out related research projects. The sub-discipline lays emphasis on the academic thought of including all visual products of human beings into its study scope based on intellectual and theoretical resources such as art history, criticism and cultural studies, critical theory and critical media theory. By deeply integrating artistic intelligence with humanistic reflection and taking pictorial genealogy, viewing behavior and related social life as its research focus, the sub-discipline, based on history and reality, studies the production and visual mechanism of pictures and explores the theoretical structure of modern and contemporary art and criticism.

The sub-discipline dates back to the Fine Arts Teacher Training discipline in 1985. Art Education, with the perception of arts and the nature of education being intelligence cultivation as the starting point, has established art practices and theories with "ideological, experimental and creative" academic features to support and promote the basic and applied research of art in human development and art education, with an aim to cultivate high-end talents in intellectual creation and innovative practice, and disseminators of social art ideas and culture. Art Management, based on modern management concepts, cultural market demands, as well as the teaching principles of comprehensive training and comprehensive potential development, aims to train inter-disciplinary talents with both hands-on art experience and solid methodological research skills, who are able to adapt to the cultural development strategy and needs of the times.