Date & Time: Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Introduction & Welcome: 6:30PM-6:35PM; Film Screening: 6:35PM-7:25PM; Break: 7:25PM-7:30PM
Conversation with Zheng Shengtian: 7:30PM-8:00PM; Q&A: 8:00PM-8:15PM
Moderator: Jane Debevoise; Speaker: Mr. Zheng Shengtian
Event Fees: Members – FREE, Non-Members – $5
Location: 40 Rector Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10006

Beginning in 1966, China’s Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution was a mass movement that shook the foundations of Modern China to its core. The movement’s ubiquitous presence deeply disrupted all aspects of Chinese society, and has had a lasting impact on Chinese culture that is still present today.

On May 3, 2016, join China Institute in collaboration with Asia Art Archive for a screening of China – The Red Sons (1968, 47 mins), shot by Australian filmmaker Roger Whittaker during a trip to China in 1968 organized by the Australian Union of University Students. One of the few documentaries made in China during the Cultural Revolution, the film offers a unique record of people’s daily lives in this period, featuring interviews with students, pupils, Red Guards and the late Anna Louise Strong.

Following the screening, renowned curator, Zheng Shengtian, and Jane DeBevoise, Chair of the Board of Directors, Asia Art Archive will host a discussion.

Shengtian Zheng was born in China and graduated from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. For more than thirty years, he worked at his alma mater as Professor and Chair of the Oil Painting Department. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota and at San Diego State University in the 1980s. Zheng has immigrated to Canada since 1990. In 1993 he was elected as the Chairman of Chinese Canadian Artists Federation in Vancouver. From 1996 to 2000, he was the Secretary of the Annie Wong Art Foundation and Director of Art Beatus Gallery. In 2002 he co-founded Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, the first English language magazine on contemporary Chinese art and has been the Managing Editor since then. He was a founding member and Board Director of Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A) from 1999 to 2011. He is also a Trustee of Asia Art Archive in North America since 2009 and Vancouver Art Gallery from 2011 to 2015. In 2015 he was appointed as the Adjunct Director of Institute for Asian Art at Vancouver Art Gallery. As an independent curator, he has organized and curated numerous exhibitions includingJiangnan – Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art Exhibitions, Shanghai Modern, the 2004 Shanghai Biennale, China Trade, Reincarnation, and Art and China’s Revolution. He has been the Senior Curator for Asia of Vancouver Biennale since 2009 and won the Lifetime Achievement Award for his curatorial work. Zheng is a frequent contributor to periodicals and catalogues of contemporary Chinese and Asian art. He has lectured widely at institutions including Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, Stanford University, Tate Modern, Getty Museum, San Francisco Asian Art Museum, among others. As an artist, his work has been showing in China, United States and Canada since 1960s and was a participant artist at the 5th Moscow Biennale in 2011. Zheng received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver in 2013.

Jane DeBevoise is Chair of the Board of Directors, Asia Art Archive, in Hong Kong and New York. Prior to moving to Hong Kong in 2002, Ms. DeBevoise was deputy director of the Guggenheim Museum, responsible for museum operations and exhibitions globally. She joined the museum in 1996 as project director of China: 5000 Years (1998), a large-scale exhibition of traditional and modern Chinese art at the Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao. Her recent book Between State and Market: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Post-Mao Era was published in 2014 by Brill.

Asia Art Archive collects and makes information on contemporary art of Asia easily accessible in order to facilitate understanding and research in the field. www.aaa.org.hk,www.aaa-a.org

For questions or to register by phone, please contact Aaron Nicholson at 212-744-8181 ext. 138 or by email at anicholson@chinainstitute.org