His first book, Wuliang Shrine: Ideology of Early Pictorial Art in China (translated by 1989 published by Sanlian Bookstore) won the Best Works Award at the Asian Academic Annual Conference in the United States that year. Monuments in China's Early Art and Architecture (1995) was rated as 1996 by Choice magazine, and was later listed as one of the most important works of art in the 1990s by Art Forum. Double Screen: Media and Expression in Chinese Painting (1996) was nominated as the best art history book in America. His important works include Three Thousand Years of Painting in China (1997) and Cambridge and the Pre-Qin History of China (1999). Wu Hong returned to China many times, gave a guest lecture at the Institute of Archaeology of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Peking University Archaeological Museum, initiated a series of international seminars on the history of ancient art and archaeological research in China during the Han and Tang Dynasties, and edited three volumes of anthologies.