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SECT VI - PRESENTERSCONVENERS:
Ackbar Abbas
Publications/Books:
Editing:
David Theo Goldberg, Ph.D., is the Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the University of California system-wide research facility for the human sciences and theoretical research in the arts. He also holds faculty appointments as Professor of Comparative Literature and Criminology, Law and Society at UC Irvine, and is a Fellow of the UCI Critical Theory Institute. Professor Goldberg's work ranges over issues of political theory, race and racism, ethics, law and society, critical theory, cultural studies and, increasingly, digital humanities. Together with Cathy Davidson of Duke University, he founded the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) to promote partnerships between the human sciences, arts, social sciences and technology and supercomputing interests for advancing research, teaching and public outreach.
He has authored numerous books, including The Threat of Race (2008); The Racial State (2002); Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (1997); Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (1993); and Ethical Theory and Social Issues: Historical Texts and Contemporary Readings (1989/1995). He has also edited or co-edited many volumes, including A Companion to Gender Studies (2005); A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies (2002); Between Law and Culture: Relocating Legal Studies (2002); Relocating Postcolonialism (2002); Race Critical Theories: Text and Context (2001); Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (1994); Jewish Identity (1993); and Anatomy of Racism (1990).
The musical traditions of China have been blended with jazz, blues, and
improvisation by composer, author, and vocalist Liu Sola. Her
recordings have spanned from multicultural treatments of the
blues—Blues in the East, recorded with guitarist James Blood Ulmer,
Parliament-Funkadelic drummer Jerome Bailey, Chinese pipa player Wu
Man, avant-garde saxophonist Henry Threadgill, and vocalist Umar Bin
Hassan of the Last Poets, and produced by Bill Laswell, to psychedelic
Chinese rock, China Collage. While www.chinasprout claimed that "this
is not your standard Chinese music—it is extremely contemporary with a
strong multicultural influence," the New York Press referred to Sola as
"the only Chinese artist who would qualify to play the New Orleans Jazz
Festival." The New York Times cited her ability to "wander from echoes
of Chinese opera to simple folk-like melodies." She has authored several books including Chaos And All (1989); Small Tales of the Great Ji Family (2000); Female Purity Soup（2003); and the play Fantasy of the Red Queen (2006). Biography
PRESENTERS:
Ah Cheng Ah Cheng , pseud. of Zhong Acheng, is a Chinese writer and painter, born in 1949. His father, the film critic Zhong Dianfei, was forced by the Communist government to sell his library of Chinese and Western classics, which Ah Cheng secretly read before delivering them to the book dealer. During the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to work on commune farms in Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, and Yunnan. After returning to Beijing in the late 1970s, he gained recognition for his drawings, stories, essays, and film scripts. In the mid-1980s he was a prominent advocate of "seeking roots" literature, a movement by young writers to reestablish their cultural roots, which had been lost during the social upheavals of the previous two decades. He is best known for his series of "king" novellas: “The King of Chess” (1984), “The King of Trees” and “The King of Children” (1985). The last was made into an acclaimed film by Chen Kaige in 1986.
assisted by Heather Szeto, Design + Management graduate student, Parsons The New School for Design, New York
Ai Weiwei lives and works in Beijing and is one of China’s most renowned contemporary artists. Working for 25 years as a conceptual artist, curator and architect, he has been consistently one of the most innovative figures in China's art world. He helped direct the course of Chinese art, not only through his own artistic production, but also through his curatorial, editorial and design projects. As an Artistic Consultant for design, Ai Wei Wei collaborated with the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron in designing the Beijing National Stadium, also known as the Bird’s Nest (NYT blog).
Giuliana Bruno is Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University and a cultural theorist who works at the intersection of film, architecture, and the visual arts. Her seminal work Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (Verso, 2002) won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award in Culture and History – a prize awarded to “the world’s best book on the moving image” – and has provided new directions for film and visual studies. Atlas was also honored as Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association, and named a Book of the Year in 2003 by the Guardian. Its mobility theory has inspired a new journal of visual culture, Aria, published in English and Italian. Her new book on art and film, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts, was published by MIT Press in 2007. Bruno has published four other books. Jane and Louise Wilson: A Free and Anonymous Monument (Film and Video Umbrella and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, 2004) examines the multi-screen art installation of the Turner Prize nominees. Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton University Press, 2002), a journey through modernity and cultural memory, won the 1995 Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies for best book in film studies. Off Screen was devoted to women and film in Italy (Routledge, 1988), and Immagini allo schermo (Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991) was named one of the 50 Best Books of the First 100 Years of Film History. Her essays on contemporary art are published in international books, art monographs such as Isaac Julien (Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2005), and exhibition catalogs of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Bruno lectures internationally on visual culture, including, recently, at universities in Europe and Asia, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, and the Tate Modern. She is featured in Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers (ed. Marquard Smith, Sage, 2008) as one of the most influential intellectual working today in visual studies.
Yung Ho Chang is Professor of Architecture and Head of the Department of Architecture at MIT. Before that he was Head and Professor of the Graduate Center of Architecture at Peking University. He received his M.Arch from the University of California at Berkeley and taught in the US for 15 years before returning to Beijing to establish China's first private architecture firm, Atelier FCJZ. He has exhibited internationally as an artist as well as architect and is widely published, including the monograph Yung Ho Chang/Atelier Feichang Jianzhu: A Chinese Practice. His interdisciplinary research focuses on the city, materiality, and tradition. He often combines his research activities with design commissions.
Chen Danqing is a well-known Chinese oil painter who established his name in the 1980s. His early oil paintings about Tibet are seen as milestones in China's art history. Before he could finish middle school, he was sent off to work in the countryside like many young people at that time. Forced to work hard in the fields, he used all his spare time to paint. Chen is very much a self-made painter. Chen also developed as a writer. In 2000, he accepted an offer from Tsinghua University, one of China's top education institutions, and became a Doctoral advisor at the school's Academy of Arts and Design. His decision to quit Tsinghua University in 2005 sparked a heated debate over the art education system in China. Since then, Chen has dedicated most of his time to writing books on politics, literature, painting and art education. Just as one of Chen's students said, Danqing has never been just a painter; he is an intellectual with a social conscience.
Ph.D., Brighton Polytechnic, UK. Specialist in History and Theory of 19th and 20th century Design, Fashion and Textile Design History, and Design Theory and Cultural Studies. Selected Publications: Design Issues (ed): Hong Kong design, 2003, Form/Work, Australia, 2000, The Cheongsam (Oxford University Press, 2000), Design Management Journal (1999), China Chic: East Meets West, contributor (1999). Chinese Dress 1700s–1900s contributor (1997), Dictionary of Women Artists, contributor (1997), Women’s Art Journal (1995), Contemporary Fashion, contributor (1995). Visiting Fellowships: University of Western Sydney, Australia; Koeln International School of Design, Cologne. Awards: Hong Kong Polytechnic, Provisional Regional Council of Hong Kong. Affiliated: Hong Kong Designers Association, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Manufacturers, Fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers. Lectures internationally.
Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing, two classmates from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, founded Lekker Design, a small environmental design practice, in 2002. Lekker offers consultancy services in the design of buildings, landscapes and interiors. To date, they have focused on small and mid-sized projects, with the design of two larger master-planning schemes. While Lekker does not have a “house style,” previous work shows a strong emphasis upon craft and durability of detailing, as well as the production of unusual contemporary spaces. The work of Ong and Comaroff, separately and together, has been published in various popular and academic media, including a feature in August 2004 and the upcoming "Lagos: how it works," edited by Rem Koolhaas. Joshua Comaroff received his Master in Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has just completed his PhD in Geography at UCLA.
Laurent Guttierrez is a French architect who lives and works in Hong Kong. In 1997, he co-founded MAP office, a collaborative studio involved in cross-disciplinary projects that incorporate architecture and the visual arts with his partner Valérie Portefaix. Since 2000, he has been Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design where he has been a leading architectural researcher on environmental planning and design. Since 2002, he has served as head of Theory & History program. He is the author of a number of articles about urban phenomena in Hong Kong and China, including Mapping HK (2000), which details both the physical and dynamic transformations taking place in Hong Kong; HK LAB (2002), an interdisciplinary book in which Hong Kong is seen as an advanced laboratory for innovative solutions; and an architectural monograph, Yung Ho Chang/Atelier Feichang Jianzhu - A Chinese Practice (2003). Current research on "Lean Planning" explores the impact of production and distribution mapped onto a re-convertible environment, and the specific conditions of the "Made in China" in the Pearl River Delta region. The MAP office has participated in several local and international exhibitions, including the 7th Architecture Venice Biennale and the 1st International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam, where with his partner he won an award for the best 'Inspiration'.
assisted by Carlos Yescas-Angeles Trujano, Political Science graduate student, The New School for Social Research
Hung Huang is a Beijing-based entrepreneur who is often called "the Oprah of China." Hung was born in China, where her mother was Mao Zedong's English teacher and translator. During the Cultural Revolution Hung was sent to the Little Red School House in New York. She later attended Vassar. After college, she returned to Beijing as an investment consultant and is now CEO of China Interactive Media Group, a publishing company that prints iLook, a lifestyle magazine targeting China's middle and upper classes. Her company previously published the Chinese editions of Seventeen and Time Out Beijing. Hung writes for Economix about how Chinese culture is adapting to a rapidly changing economy. She also pens a popular personal blog (in Chinese). She co-wrote and starred in the 2005 independent film Perpetual Motion.
The focus of Hu Ying’s research is the literature and culture of late 19th to early 20th century China, a fascinating period that witnessed rapid changes in every aspect of the Chinese world. This period of great ideological and cultural fluidity bred a generation of independent thinkers. She is specifically interested in seeing how women at the time - revolutionaries, writers, artists - understood and intervened in the changes of political system, cultural values and gender norms. As a feminist scholar, Hu Ying pays close attention to the relationship between feminisms from different cultural traditions, the interaction, domestication, appropriation that occur when these traditions come into contact/conflict. As a Chinese scholar, part of her research attention is inevitably turned toward contemporary China. She has published Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1898-1918, Stanford University Press, 2000.
Michael Keith is Director of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, part of the School of Anthropology at the University of Oxford and is the Director of COMPAS (2008-). Michael Keith was formerly Professor of Sociology, Head of Department and Director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has also been a politician in the East End of London for twenty years and was at various times leader of the Council in Tower Hamlets, chair of the Thames Gateway London Partnership (2000-2006) and Commissioner on the National Commission on Integration and Cohesion (2006-07). His research interests focus on the interface between culture, urbanism and migration. He is currently researching the politics of multiculturalism in relation to changes in contemporary China. This work will be published in two volumes forthcoming in 2009. His work addresses the dynamics of contemporary city change and he has written or edited seven books, including most recently After the Cosmopolitan: multicultural cities and the future of racism (2005). His current research focuses on the interplay of city transformation and multiculturalism. Power, identity and representation, co-authored with Les Back, Kalbir Shukra and John Solomos, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2009, and the urbanism of contemporary China, (a book written with Scott Lash on Constructing China Capitalism will be published by Routledge in 2010.
Leo Lee is Professor Emeritus of Chinese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He is also a Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Hong Kong University. His areas of teaching and research include modern Chinese intellectual history, literature, and film. He is well known for promoting cultural interflow between Chinese and Western scholars, introducing new theoretical models and remapping modern Chinese literary history. As an active public critic in Hong Kong and Taiwan, he writes a weekly cultural column for Yazhou zhoukan (Asiaweek, Chinese edition) and contributes articles frequently to the local newspapers in Hong Kong. He has published about a dozen volumes of essays as well as two novels in Chinese, Confessions of a Profligate, and Fan Liuyuan, Hunter from the East, a spy-thriller. Lee’s many scholarly books in English include Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (Harvard University Press).
Liao Yimei is a prize-winning screenwriter based in Beijing. With her husband Meng Jinghui, the couple is the leading avant-garde theatre duo in China. Just as Meng is famous for his creative reinventions of Western classics such as "Faust," "Waiting for Godot," and Mayakovsky's Soviet classic "The Bedbug," Liao also fills her plays with insightful literary and cultural references that touch on the predicaments of Chinese modernity. Meng and Jinghui were classmates at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, which is regarded as one of three most prestigious drama schools in China. Selected projects: Rhinoceros In Love (1999), directed by Meng Jinghui, written by Liao Yimei. The play describes the love of a rhinoceros feeder for a beautiful woman. It has been described as a 'classic drama' of modern Chinese theatre. Chicken Poets (Xiang Ji Yi Yang Fei) (2002), directed by Meng Jinghui, written by Liao Yimei, (China). Cast: Qin Hailu, Chen Minohao, Liao Fan, Wang Jinsong, Yang Ting. 2003 Tribeca Film Festival 2007 Tribeca Film Festival Stolen Life (Sheng Si Jie), directed by Li Shaohong, written by Liao Yimei, (China). Cast: Zhou Xun, Wu Jun, Cai Ming, Su Xiaoming, Wang Pelyi. 2005 Tribeca Film Festival – World Premiere /Winner Best Narrative Feature Film 2007 Tribeca Film Festival
Amber, directed by Meng Jinghui, written by Liao Yimei. Magic Mountain (Mo Shan), a fairytale written by renowned playwright Liao Yimei and two co-authors, Shi Yihang and Zhang Qiyi, was published in early January 2006. Arguably China's most popular children's play, Magic Mountain is estimated to draw an audience of more than 60,000 children.
Chinese painter Liu Dan was born in 1953 into a scholarly family that educated its children in philosophy, poetry, painting and calligraphy. "My grandfather taught me calligraphy because he believed that writing was the mark of a gentleman, just as in the Western world, it is his speech," he says. Thanks to him, Liu's calligraphically-trained hand marked him as an exceptional artist in later life. In 1966, Mao's Cultural Revolution sent Liu to the countryside, where he spent years farming rice. Liu continued to practice drawing and writing. After the Cultural Revolution ended, he entered the reopened Jiangsu Academy for Graduate Studies in Nanjing in 1978 where he continued to study ink painting from ancient models while trying to find his own way. In 1981, Liu immigrated to the United States and forged a new kind of art synthesis of the old and new. He embarked upon a new branch of painting that dissolves the boundaries between the old and new with his monumental landscapes. Liu’s hand-scrolls have been exhibited in museums throughout China and around the world, including the San Diego Museum of Art.
Achille Mbembe was born in Cameroon in 1957. He obtained his Ph.D. in History at the University of Sorbonne in Paris, France, in 1989. He subsequently obtained a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in the same city. As one of the most sought-after postcolonial theorists today, he has spent time working at Columbia University, New York, Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., University of Pennsylvania, University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Irvine, Yale University, Duke University and Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) in Dakar, Senegal. He is currently a member of the staff at WISER Institute in Johannesburg, South Africa and also serves as a Contributing Editor for the scholarly journal Public Culture. His main topics are African history and politics, social science., and aesthetics. His classic work On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation has been published by the University of California Press, in 2001.
Brian McGrath is Associate Professor of Urban Design at Parsons The New School for Design and the founder of urban-interface, a design studio that works at the intersection of new media, urban design and ecology. He is the author of two books published by John Wiley & Sons: Digital Modeling for Urban Design and Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today with Jean Gardner. He is the co-editor with David Grahame Shane of a special issue of AD: Sensing the 21st Century City: Close up and Remote. McGrath served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Thailand in 1998-99, recently completed a two year fellowship at the New School’s India China Institute, and is also a co-PI for the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, an interdisciplinary long term ecological research project.
Architect. Publications: "Cube House," Architecture and Body; "Bronx Perimeter Housing," Avery News. Formerly: Mitchell/Giurgola and Thorpe, Australia; Pei Cobb, Freed and Partners, NYC. Currently: Paci + Mears Architects. B.SC, Australian National University; B.Arch, University of Canberra; M.Arch, Columbia University.
Meng Jinghui, the most active drama director in Beijing, is famed for his innovative style. Being a leading theater director in recent years, Meng Jinghui stirs up a storm of "experimental drama" in China with his continuous efforts in the field. To some extent, his name has become synonymous with "avant-garde" and "alternative", but his plays have also been very popular in the small theaters in Beijing, which enhances Meng's reputation of being both popular and avant-garde. Meng has more than ten plays to his credit, including Si Fan, The Balcony, I Love XXX, Amber, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Rhinoceros in Love, and Bootleg Faust.
William Milberg is Associate Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research and Research Fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic and Policy Analysis. His research focuses on:
He has worked as a consultant to the UNDP, UNCTAD, and ILO. He is the co-author (with Robert Heilbroner) of The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought and The Making of Economic Society and editor of Labor and the Globalization of Production: Causes and Consequences of Industrial Upgrading and The Megacorp and Oligopoly: Essays in Memory of Alfred Eichner. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Rutgers University in 1987.
Ning Ying (born 1959) is a Chinese film director often considered a member of China's "Sixth Generation" filmmaker group. Part of the first class to reenter the Beijing Film Academy in 1978, Ning studied also in Italy's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. While in Italy, she met Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, for whom she would serve as an assistant director for in the 1987 epic The Last Emperor. Her own career first reached international prominence with 1993's For Fun (also known as Looking for Fun), which would become the first of Ning Ying's "Beijing Trilogy," a loosely tied grouping of films that all take place in Beijing. The other two films include On the Beat and I Love Beijing. Together, the films are an analysis of the massive changes that China's national capital has undergone in the recent decades. In 2003, the trilogy was shown in its entirety by the Harvard Film Archive in an event touted as "From China with Love: The Films of Ning Ying." Ning followed her Beijing trilogy with a full-length documentary, Railroad of Hope in 2002, which traced the mass migration of cheap labor throughout China. The film won the Grand Prix du Cinema du Reel in 2002. In 2005, she made Perpetual Motion, which premiered in several major film festivals, notably Venice and Toronto, starring Hung Huang and Liu Sola, both participants in SECT.
Sarah Nuttall is a senior researcher at WISER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand) in Johannesburg and also serves as a Contributing Editor for the scholarly journal Public Culture. Dr. Nuttall, a South African Rhodes Scholar, obtained her D.Phil at Oxford in 1994 and lectured in English at the University of Stellenbosch from 1997 to 2001. She was a Visiting Professor at the Institute for English and American Studies at the University of Salzburg, Austria, from March to June 2000, a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, from January to March 2001, and a Visiting Professor in English and African American Studies at Yale University from September to December 2003. She is co-editor of Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia (Routledge, 1996); Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (OUP, 1998); and Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies (OUP, 2000), editor of Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics (2004) and author of a forthcoming volume of essays on South African Literatures.
Designer, artist, writer, musician, principal, Happy Mazza Media. MA Candidate New School University, MS Polytechnic University, BFA University of Michigan. Jane has a diverse background in art, technology and the design and creation of digital media. Her expertise in Information and Interface design has led to the creation of many innovative and successful projects for a long list of corporate clients. As the founder and creative director of the award-winning design firm Happy Mazza Media, Jane oversees the original brands Not For Tourists and drummergirl.com. Jane also teaches digital design and theory courses at Pratt and Ramapo College.
Valérie Portefaix is a French architect, based and teaching in Hong Kong. She received her Master of Architecture degree from the School of Architecture Paris-Belleville and a PhD in Urbanism from University Pierre Mendes France. She has held Visiting Professor appointments and lectured at numerous academic institutions including the Department of Architecture at Hong Kong University. In 1997, she co-founded MAP office with her partner Laurent Gutierrez in Hong Kong—a collaborative studio involved in cross-disciplinary projects that incorporate architecture and the visual arts. They have participated in several local and international exhibitions, including the 7th Architecture Venice Biennale and the 1st International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam, where they won an award for the best 'Inspiration'. They have published a number of articles on urban phenomena in Hong Kong and China. Their publications include Mapping HK (2000), which details both the physical and dynamic transformations taking place in Hong Kong; HK LAB (2002), a interdisciplinary book in which Hong Kong is seen as an advanced laboratory for innovative solutions; and an architectural monograph, Yung Ho Chang/Atelier Feichang Jianzhu - A Chinese Practice (2003). Their current research on "Lean planning" explores the impact of production and distribution mapped onto a re-convertible environment, and the specific conditions of the "Made in China" in the Pearl River Delta region.
Vyjayanthi Rao received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and was a Post-Doctoral Associate at Yale University prior to joining The New School. Her research focuses on globalization, development and urbanism and she is working on a book project titled The Speculative Ethic and the Spirit of Globalization.
William H. Sun is the Vice President of and Professor of Drama at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. His current projects include building a new interdisciplinary field, Social Performance Studies, sponsored by the Department of Art Studies at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. He is also a playwright and a contributing editor for the MIT Press Journal The Drama Review (TDR). He holds an MA in Literature from Shanghai Theatre Academy (1981) and an MA in Humanities from State University of New York, Buffalo, USA (1985) and a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University (1990). He taught world theatre history, dramatic literature/theory, playwriting, acting, performance studies, etc. at Macalester College, Tufts University in the US, and York University in Toronto, Canada. He taught PhD students since 1993 at Tufts and was resident director. Sun returned to teach in Shanghai in 1999. His major research interests are social performance studies, intercultural theatre and theatre narratology. His research grants include grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and China’s national arts research project. His latest publications include The Fourth Wall: Theatre in Construction and Whose Madam Butterfly? Conflicts on Stage and Clash of Civilizations, and he published over 120 Chinese and English papers published in China, USA, Canada, UK, and Singapore. Sun's various plays such as The Old B Hanging on the Wall, China Dream and Yue opera Hedda Gabler have been staged in China, U.S., Japan, Singapore, and Norway.
[Back to top] Tan Ping, born in 1960, received his BFA from CAFA, majored in print-making. From 1984 to 1989 he served as a lecturer at CAFA. In 1989 he went to study at Free Art Department of Berlin University of the Arts where he got his MFA. In 1994 he taught at Printmaking Department of CAFA, in 1995 he taught in Design Department of CAFA and in 2002 he was directo, School of Design at CAFA. Ever since 2003 he has been Vice President of CAFA. He is also Consultant of Dongdao Design, one of the most respected graphic design companies in China. Renowned for their international design concept and pragmatic methodology, they are specialists in Graphic Design, Corporate Identity, Environmental, Signage and Web & New Media Design. They are working closely with clients from all different sectors (Governmental Institutions, Sport Events, IT, Telecommunications, Financial services, Aviation, Real Estate, Chemicals Industry, Trade, Tobbacco Industry, etc.). Dongdao Design designed, among others, the logo and Visual Identity for the National Aquatics Center—the Water Cube for the Olympic Games in Beijing 2008. Besides print, Tan Ping has turned his keen interest in oil painting into remarkable success. His series themed "life", which includes "Breed", "Gestation" and "Growth", has been widely acclaimed; critics have echoed its in-depth reflection of life in an abstract way. Oil paint lovers all over the world enjoy his works as his exhibits scan the globe. Website
Anne Warr is an Australian architect who has lived in Shanghai for many years. A graduate from the University of New South Wales and the University of York, UK, where she earned a Master of Arts in Heritage Conservation, Anne worked for a number of years in Australia in the field of heritage conservation. Since living in Shanghai, Anne has written articles for local and international magazines about Shanghai, and has published a definitive history of architecture in Shanghai. She has taught Western Architecture at Tongji University and started a tour guiding business called "WalkShanghei.com". Anne and her partner, Tim Schwager, run the Shanghai Office of the Australian Architectural firm "AJ+C". As a leading authority on the history of built forms in Shanghai, Anne has over 20 years of heritage consulting experience in both China and Australia. A qualified heritage architect and design journalist, her most recent professional activities include appointment as a heritage consultant on the Shanghai Conservatorium of Music masterplan, author of an architectural guide to Shanghai, and membership of the Shanghai Historic Houses Association. Prior to joining AJ+C in 2003, Anne was the Heritage Manager for the New South Wales Department of Public Works, where she managed a highly skilled team of conservation professionals for 10 years. This led to her appointment as Heritage Manager for the City of Sydney.
Xu Bing was born in 1955 in Chongqing, China; he lives and works in New York and Beijing. Xu Bing's artistic practice is an exploration of language. In works ranging from monumental installations to handcrafted books, he plays with the written word, usually in the form of the Chinese character. For Book from the Sky (1987-90), included in the groundbreaking touring exhibition New Chinese Art Inside Out, Xu Bing created more than 200 hand-printed, hand-bound volumes of a single book. The seemingly classical text of the book, exalted in this grand and poetic installation, had been written from an alphabet of some 2,000 Chinese characters that were, in fact, of the artist's invention. In his work, the artist uses tradition to subvert culture, recasting the cultural meaning and the authority of language. A leader of the cultural avant-garde in Beijing, following his relocation to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, Xu Bing's education includes an M.A. from Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Art, where he studied traditional bookbinding and calligraphy. In 1990, he moved to New York, where he bases his studio while working on major exhibitions and community-based collaborative works around the world. A 1999 MacArthur Fellow, Xu Bing has exhibited work at major international exhibitions in Venice, Johannesburg, and Sydney, as well as at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Ludwig, Köln; The Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Hiroshima City Museum, Japan; and Han Mo Art Center, Beijing, among other museums. In 2001, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution organized a major solo exhibition, Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing. In 2004, Xu Bing was the first winner of the Artes Mundi Prize, an international monetary award honoring one successful artist each year who explores the human condition in his work. In 2008, he was appointed Vice President of Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts, with responsibilities to guide the school's international relations and artistic direction. |
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