Materials of the future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art From 1980-1990

Cohen, Joan Lebold 2009-10-15
Brooklyn,
New York

Conducted in English

“[In the late 1970s, early 1980s] I would visit artists in their quarters and often find three of them living in a room with what we would presume to be a coffee table and a bed. These places were so tiny and modest, and yet the artists were so eager to share and invite me for a meal to talk. Magazines were the thing at the time. They were all looking at magazines, but I knew they were really just reading one book [on Freud]. And I knew that because when I was giving lectures I would always get questions about Freud: ‘What did I think of Freud?’”

Biography:

Joan Lebold Cohen is a photographer and art historian who specializes in Chinese art and film.

A regular visitor to Asia since 1961, Cohen has lived for some time in Japan, Hong Kong and China, where she was witness to the post-Cultural Revolution period of 1979 to 1981. Her book The New Chinese Painting, 1949–1986 was one of the first English-language publications to introduce recent generations of Chinese artists to the West.

Cohen has served as a curator for several exhibitions of new Chinese art in the United States as well as for the photographic exhibition ‘New York, the City and Its People’, in Beijing. Following a 22-year career as a lecturer at Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Ms Cohen is now a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies, as well as an Associate of Columbia University’s Modern China Seminar.

Cohen, Joan Lebold 2009-10-15 Brooklyn, New York

Cohen, Joan Lebold 2009-10-15
Brooklyn,
New York