Events

Saturday, June 10, 3pm

Around Pan Yuliang

With Éric Lefebvre (director, Musée Cernuschi, Paris) & Francesca Dal Lago (art his­to­rian spe­cial­ized in Chinese art and images of the 20th cen­tury).
Roundtable mod­er­ated by Nikita Yingqian Cai (curator of the exhi­bi­tion Pan Yuliang: A Journey to Silence, asso­ciate director and chief curator of Guangdong Times Museum)

(This event will be in English)

Éric Lefebvre and Francesca Dal Lago will pre­sent an axis of reflec­tion around Pan Yuliang, the talks will be fol­lowed by a dis­cus­sion.

Photograph taken by Hu Yun of the archive of Marianne Yen, the daughter of the Chinese sculptor Yan Dehui. Courtesy: Marianne Yen & Hu Yun

Being a women and an artist in China during the modern period, between Nationalism and Emancipation

In the later stages of the Empire, in 1911, a deep period of social and cul­tural changes took place in China, in which women had a main role to play, even if they kept being instru­men­tal­ized by the Government as a symbol of the awak­ening and mod­ern­iza­tion of the country.
Until then, women were totally sub­jected to the power of their father and hus­band – sym­bol­ized by the prac­tice of foot binding – how­ever, during the Chinese Republic era (1911 – 1937), women were even­tu­ally enti­tled to receive an edu­ca­tion and to self-develop as never before in the Chinese his­tory.
In this pre­sen­ta­tion, I will talk about the topic of the eman­ci­pa­tion of Women during this period through the example of some women who ben­e­fited from this unique oppor­tu­nity to become artists.

Francesca Dal Lago is an art his­to­rian spe­cial­ized in Chinese art and images of the 20th cen­tury. She is grad­u­ated in Chinese lan­guage and civ­i­liza­tion from the University of Venice. She com­pleted a PhD in Art History at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. She suc­ces­sively lived in China, in the US, in Canada and in the Netherlands. In 1993, she was appointed curator of the first Chinese pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She taught Art History at the McGill University of Montreal and was a researcher at the Leyde Unviersity, Netherland. She wrote papers on sub­jects related to Chinese art during the Modern and Contemporary periods (art of the cul­tural rev­o­lu­tion, con­tem­po­rary artists, visual pro­pa­ganda of the Chinese com­mu­nist party etc.). Since her arrival in Paris in 2011, she has been inter­ested in Chinese artists who lived in France and Europe during the inter-war period and on the issue of method­olog­ical ways of exhibiting Chinese art in Western museums.

Chinese artists in Paris: actions and exhi­bi­tions

Eric Lefebvre is the Director of the Musée Cernuschi - Museum of Asian Art of the city of Paris.
From 2013 to 2015 he was the curator of Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy at the Musée Guimet (MNAAG) in Paris. From 2004 to 2013 he was curator of the Chinese col­lec­tions at the Musée Cernuschi, where he orga­nized sev­eral exhi­bi­tions, including, most recently Chinese artists in Paris, from Lin Fengmian to Zao Wou-ki (Paris, 2011), The Shanghai School, Paintings and Calligraphies from the Shanghai Museum (Paris, 2013), Paris-Chinese Painting, the legacy of the XXth Century Chinese Masters (Hong-Kong, 2014), Splendor of the Han, Rise of the Celestial Empire (Paris, 2015), Walasse Ting, The Flower Thieft (2016).
Eric Lefebvre holds a doc­torate in art his­tory from Sorbonne University, with a dis­ser­ta­tion on Ruan Yuan’s col­lec­tions as an example of the trans­mis­sion of cul­tural her­itage in pre-modern China. His fields of research are the his­tory of col­lec­tions of Chinese art in late impe­rial China and modern Europe, and the his­tory of the Chinese artistic pres­ence in Paris in the XXth cen­tury. Between 2002 and 2014 he was an asso­ciate lec­turer at the Sorbonne University.