Exhibition on China and Fashion Attract 0.7 Millions

“中国：镜花水月"Damon Winter/The New York Times

A dress by Guo Pei at the “China: Through the Looking Glass” exhibit.

The talk of Wall Street over the last week may have been Shanghai’s plunging stock market, but many blocks farther uptown, where commuter traffic gives way to verdant sidewalks, a different set of numbers related to China was making news. As it entered its final week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring Costume Institute show, “China: Through the Looking Glass,” was attaining blockbuster status.

As of last Friday morning, 735,000 people had attended the show, with a week to go before its close on Sept. 7, including a final Friday and Saturday with viewing hours extended until midnight. That has already made it the most-visited Costume Institute show in the museum’s history, displacing “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” which pulled in 661,509 attendees, as well as elevating it to No. 7 — and climbing — on the museum’s top-10 most popular list, on a par with other 700,000-plus-visitor shows such as the “Mona Lisa” (1963), “Origins of Impressionism” (1995) and “Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” (2010).

Andrew Bolton, curator at the Costume Institute and the man behind the show, said there have been more positive responses left in the visitor’s comment box than ever before. (“Usually people use it as an opportunity to vent displeasure,” he said. “Often at the lighting, or the signage.”)

By any objective measure, this will be the most successful fashion show the Met has ever had. The question is: Why?

“Honestly, it totally surprised me,” Mr. Bolton said. “I was prepared for it to be polarizing. We were predicting around 500,000 visitors. I never expected this level of response. ”

“No one expected it would surpass McQueen,” said Maxwell K. Hearn, the Douglas Dillon chairman of the department of Asian art, and Mr. Bolton’s collaborator on the exhibition, which is in the Asian art galleries on the second floor, some Egyptian galleries on the first floor and the Anna Wintour Costume Center on ground level.

A visitor photographs a Dior dress by John Galliano at the Met exhibition.
/Damon Winter/The New York Times

A visitor photographs a Dior dress by John Galliano at the Met exhibition.

I didn’t expect it, either. Not because I didn’t like the show (it’s visually engrossing in its mix of luxury, whimsy and point) but because it doesn’t have the single iconic hook that can transform a purportedly high culture meditation into an extended pop culture moment.

After all, it isn’t, as Mr. Bolton said, immediately obvious from the name what the show is about. (Answer: the way a received fantasy version of China engages the imaginations of Western designers.) And the subject itself was ripe for criticism from those who thought the approach played to a now-discredited stereotype of the East. You can’t attribute it to the sheer size of the exhibition, the largest ever, or it’s length, because size does not equate to allure.

There wasn’t the sort of human gossip element that helped drive interest in the McQueen show, held a year after the designer’s suicide and days after Kate Middleton married Prince William in a dress by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen.

There was, to be fair, lots of striking use of mixed media, which made it seem both very contemporary as well as historic. And it included film — Wong Kar-wai, who wrote and directed “In the Mood for Love,” was the exhibit’s art director, and clips from movies like “The Last Emperor” and “The World of Suzie Wong” abound — always a popular medium.

But Mr. Wong is an independent director as opposed to a household name, and when Baz Luhrmann, a much more recognizable Hollywood figure, was the creative consultant on an earlier Costume Institute show, 2012’s “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” it wasn’t nearly the same hot ticket.

When I first saw the show in May, I was struck by the facile nature of the fashion when juxtaposed against the antiquities. No matter the clothes’ beauty — I remember the runway impact of Tom Ford’s pagoda collection for Yves Saint Laurent and being amazed by the broken blue and white china shards of porcelain on an Alexander McQueen bodice — they pale when compared with the source of the inspiration, in part because the latter has a creative integrity the former only borrows. Often too literally. Please go to The New York Times read more about this story.

At Pearl River, Four Decades of Helping New Arrivals From Asia

Every morning, Ming Yi Chen walks down to the basement of Pearl River Mart, the Chinese department store he opened in 1971, and burns incense. Then he walks back to the first floor to light more incense. He breathes in the sandalwood, to him a calming scent. And the day can begin.

With the news this week that Pearl River Mart, at 477 Broadway in SoHo, would close in December because of a significant rent increase and an unsustainable business model, it became clear that Mr. Chen’s routine — and those of his 40 employees — would soon disappear into the capitalist cloud.

“There are people waiting for this space,” Mr. Chen, 76, said from the tea balcony, overlooking a floor that stretches from Broadway to Mercer Street, 30,000 square feet in all. “Maybe H & M, one of those big chains — with big pockets.”

It is fair to say that those big-pocketed stores do not offer the soundtrack of traditional Chinese music and tweeting birds, nor do they display lanterns, gongs and 60-foot-long paper dragons amid waterfalls. From the soy sauce and Chinese underwear that were lifelines for homesick Chinese immigrants to the slippers and qipao dresses that became staples for New York fashionistas, Pearl River Mart tells a lesser-known tale that is more than the sum of its dry goods.

Run with a strong, nurturing hand by Mr. Chen’s wife, Ching Yeh Chen, 68, Pearl River has provided a life for its immigrant workers for four decades. It has been a welcome alternative to restaurant and supermarket jobs for new immigrants, a place where Cantonese and Mandarin were spoken and employee banquets were held every year. The store, overseen by a board of trustees and 30 shareholders, has helped some workers apply for green cards, once had a matching 401(k) plan and still offers health insurance.

“We are probably one of the few pioneer companies that does that in Chinatown — I’m proud to say that,” Mrs. Chen, the president, said of the insurance plan. “Most of Chinatown, everything is in cash. In that sense, we are pretty fair, and people will stay here long enough.” (The store has been in four locations, including Canal Street.)

Often, two generations have worked side by side, and some employees have turned a job stocking shelves into a lifelong career.

“I’ve been with the Chens since I immigrated to the United States, as a part-time worker,” Wilkie Wong, 50, said. He had just arrived from Burma in 1982 and was attending Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side. Mrs. Chen knew a school counselor and asked her for part-time employees. Mr. Wong showed up with two of his classmates; now he is the company’s vice president.

Asked about the store’s closing, Mr. Wong said, “I have mixed feelings.” He just got an office with a window two years ago, he explained. A graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo with a degree in economics and international trade, he had been doing the accounting in a separate basement office on Wooster Street.

But the future concerns him. Mrs. Chen said she would like to move to smaller quarters, downsize the inventory and, to better compete with Amazon, boost the online business, which Mr. Wong directs. “If we continue, he’s still with us,” she said.

But Mr. Wong’s 16-year-old son will not be joining him. “As an immigrant to the United States, it’s the same as my parents and every parent who wants their kids to have a high education, be a lawyer, doctor,” Mr. Wong said. “Even though I enjoy working here, I want him to have better than what I had.”

For some longtime employees, it might be time to move on. Lapyan Ng, 63, from Hong Kong, has worked at Pearl River for over 20 years. “Maybe I need to retire and take care of my granddaughter,”   >>

Hungry City: The Bao in the East Village

It’s a perilous moment, lifting a soup dumpling from its basket, hoping it won’t tear and spill its beautiful guts. This one’s skin is delicate but does not break, at least not yet, not under the tongs’ little teeth. The dumpling lands in the spoon intact, plump but not sagging, buoyant as a ball gown. Take a bite, gently, from the top; watch the steam flee; sip the broth inside, just enough to taste; then down it whole.

At the Bao, which opened in the East Village in July, the soup dumplings, or xiao long bao, are near perfect. (The menu calls this achievement “kung fu,” using the term in its original sense, as mastery acquired through practice and discipline.) Other specimens in town tend to the thick, to prevent leaks; here the dough is ultrathin, less armor than envelope for the broth — pork-stock jelly, which melts into soup as the dumplings steam — and the ball of minced pork at the center, loose and yielding, as if itself in midmelt. I did wish the soup were more flagrantly meaty, but this far from Shanghai, I’m just grateful.

 The Bao is an outpost of Kung Fu Xiao Long Bao, which the owner, Hong Bao, opened two and a half years ago in Flushing, Queens. She oversees the dim sum at both locations, but beyond the classic varieties of soup dumpling — pork and notably briny pork and crab — the restaurants diverge. East Village innovations include xiao long bao jacked up on chile, anticipating the bravado of the young and the drunk, and others spiked with wasabi, a gesture toward the neighborhood’s Japanese expats.

The rest of the menu is greatest-hits Chinese, corralling flamethrowers from Sichuan and Hunan with old-school Cantonese and Taiwanese specialties. Much of this is delicious: a garlicky confetti of chives, with pork nubs and dark pops of salt from fermented black beans; pressed, dense tofu ruddied from steeping in five spice; pickled string beans chopped into tiny rings and bobbing in a sour rice noodle soup; strips of featherweight fried chicken, almost outnumbered by dried red chiles; noodles alchemized by an age-old calculus of soy, sesame oil and sugar; and shrimp dashed with Shaoxing (rice wine) and engulfed in barely set scrambled eggs that slip through the chopsticks. (I ate the leftovers, still slippery, out of the box when I got home.)

 Please read the whole story at NYTs.com.

Michelle Phan, YouTube Maven

Adage lunched its 2014 Media Mavens list. Michelle Phan, YouTube-star, is one of them. She draw a lot of my attention after I watched her "Draw my life" at YouTube. It's very touching. I never thought the lovely girl had a very tough childhood.

Michelle Phan was a freshman design student at the Ringling College of Art and Design when she posted her first video makeup tutorial on YouTube in 2007. It got 40,000 views in a week.


By 2009, YouTube had approached her about joining its partner program, and after videos on "How to Get Lady Gaga's Eyes" brought her over a million subscribers, L'Oréal's Lancôme approached her about becoming the brand's official video artist. She quit school after her junior year.


Senior year was to be devoted to a capstone project, which was going to be creating her own makeup line. By 2013, she'd done that anyway, with Em by Michelle Phan through L'Oréal (and Ringling gave her a well-earned honorary degree).

She now has a YouTube channel with nearly 7 million subscribers, has starred in a Dr. Pepper commercial, started the multi-channel FAWN (For All Women Network) and is publishing a book in October.

But she's not giving up on makeup tutorials, which have become a genre dominated by bloggers like her rather than brands.

"Normal people, customers, just connect more to a person than a brand," Ms. Phan said. "A brand is a brand. You get great products, but you don't really connect to a brand. A lot of beauty brands are trying to crack the code, but I'll be honest, it's not a code you're supposed to crack. You have to go with the flow and let people like myself champion your brand and use the products in a more genuine and authentic way."


If you want to read her whole story, please go to Glamour.
Phan's new book: Make Up

Chinese Americans Face Stereotypes, Good and Bad

The first large group of Chinese immigrants came to the United States in the middle 1800s. At that time, some Chinese moved to the American west to build a railroad across the country. Many others worked in mines or on farms.
 
Chinese immigrants helped the U.S. economy. However, most Americans saw the Chinese as competitors.

William Wei

William Wei teaches history at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He says Chinese immigrants were not treated well. They had to live together in poor neighborhoods, or do hard work in laundries and restaurants that did not pay very much.

Mr. Wei says the American public did not believe Chinese immigrants could ever be part of their society.

In fact, in 1882 the US Congress approved and the president signed the Chinese Exclusion Act. The law barred Chinese people from moving to the United States and becoming citizens. It was the first and only US law to ban a specific ethnic group.

The US government cancelled the ban during the 1940s after China became an American ally in World War II. Yet the government limited the number of Chinese migrants to just 105 per year. Finally, in 1965, the government ended the system restricting Chinese immigration.
 

Frank Wu

​Frank H. Wu leads the Hastings College of the Law at the University of California. He says the history of Chinese immigrants in the United States helps explain why so many Chinese Americans are well-educated.

“The Chinese people who were able to immigrate were talented, they were students on scholarships, they were people who had great potential,” he says.

Mr. Wu says many Chinese Americans are pleased the American public considers them smart, good citizens who fit well into the country.

But, he adds, even positive stereotypes about Chinese Americans cause problems.

Mr. Wu says the United States includes people of many races, and one race should not be considered better.

He says white Americans may also blame other minorities for not being as successful as the Chinese.

“Some Americans say: ‘Look what we did to the Chinese. We discriminated against them, committed violence against them, excluded them from our country, yet they still have achieved. Therefore, if your minority has not succeeded in our land of opportunity, it is clearly your fault.’”

Mr. Wu says such thinking leads people to think victims are responsible for their abuse.

Charles Gallagher of LaSalle University added that all Chinese Americans are not good in school. One who does not succeed as easily may feel he or she does not really belong.

Helen Zia

Helen Zia is a Chinese American writer. She says US policy makers may believe the Chinese are successful, so the government does not have to help those who are poor or suffering.

And, Ms. Zia says, some people may believe Chinese Americans are too successful. 

“If we are perceived as being able to endure everything,” she says, “it also means that we can be perceived as being able to take over everything.” Read more at VOA.

The Year She Left Us

At the heart of Kathryn Ma’s haunting first novel, “The Year She Left Us,” is a young woman who loses her way. Ari is 18 and home from a summer in China, where she worked for a company that takes Western families with adopted Chinese girls on “heritage tours.” They visit the orphanages and, sometimes, the places where the abandoned babies were first found: police stations, department stores and random patches of dirt by the side of the road. For these orphans, their “Finding Day” may be the closest approximation to the simple commonplace most of us take for granted — a birthday.

Ari was one of those girls. She was left in a Kunming department store and later adopted by a Chinese-American lawyer called Charlie, a single woman whose sister and mother also play a big part in her daughter’s life. Ari has been told that she’s lucky — “Lucky girl” are the first two words of the book — but she’s not feeling it, despite her grandmother’s reminder that “nobody has to know” she’s adopted; the “skin tone” of her adoptive mother “was exactly the same.” “It must be so much easier for you, having a Chinese family,” Ari hears again and again. “It should have been easier, but it wasn’t,” she thinks. “I felt stupid, alone and defective.”

Yet she inhabits a populated, socially connected world. Ari — her full name is Ariadne Bettina Yun-li Rose Kong — grew up in the Bay Area as a member of the Whackadoodles, a collective of “Western-Adopted Chinese Daughters, corralled on a monthly basis at a playground or a park so that the girls with white parents could see girls who looked like themselves.” The Whackadoodles go on field trips to San Francisco’s Chinatown “to watch lion dancers or eat special cakes or buy willow or forsythia or flowering quince branches for Lunar New Year and the Lantern Festival and Qingming and the Moon Festival too.” None of which Charlie’s Chinese-American family “had ever bothered to celebrate growing up in Palos Verdes.”

Kathryn Ma

Groups make their own idioms, and one of the pleasures of “The Year She Left Us” is the exuberance of the Whackadoodles’ expressions, like “Gotcha Day” and “forever families.”But there are forbidden words too. When Ari ventures to talk about how her parents abandoned her, “The A-word in my mouth felt dangerous and thrilling.”

The foundling may be a familiar figure in the history of the novel, most prominently in Dickens and the Brontës, but Ma gives us a striking 21st-century iteration. In 1992, China passed a law allowing foreign adoptions. Since then, Americans have brought home more than 80,000 Chinese children — most of them girls, because of China’s infamous one-child policy and a cultural prejudice that favors sons.

Read the whole book review, please go to the New York Time.

The Year She Left Us, by Kathryn Ma
Harper, 326 pages

I.M.Pei, Born Being A Greatest Archtect

I.M. Pei's Pyramid from Below, photo by John Weiss

I can not remember when I started interesting in Mr. Pei's life story and his architectural works. You may not believe that when visited the Louvre thirteen years ago, I even didn't know he designed the beautiful glass pyramid entrance for the iconic building. But I am always fascinated by the beautiful architectures most likely because my uncle, his son and my older brother all work in this professional field, even my young nephew right now.  

Several years ago, I went to New York City attending my graduate school. And the big apple opened my eyes for the wonderful architectural world! By accident, I discovered one biographic book of Pei at a library, and then I started strolling around the whole Manhattan from uptown to downtown to find out the buildings designed by him. I went to Kips Bay area where Mr. Pei started his architectural career in New York City. I went to see the Four Seasons Hotel, the tallest hotel building in NYC, which was also designed by Mr. Pei, I looked around the uptown where Mr. Pei is living...I agree with him that New York City is not the most beautiful city but it's the most vibrant city in the world.  

I. M. Pei(full name: Ieoh Ming Pei, 贝聿銘) was born in China on April 26, 1917, Canton, Guangzhou. When he was 17 years old, he traveled to the United States, initially attending the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia before transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a bachelor's degree in architecture in 1940.

Pei soon continued his studies at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, where he had the opportunity to study with German architect and founder of the Bauhaus design movement Walter Gropius. During World War II, Pei took a break from his education to work for the National Defense Research Committee. In 1944, he returned to Harvard and earned his master's degree in architecture two years later. Around this time, Pei also worked an assistant professor at the university.

Kennedy Library and Museum

 
In 1948, Pei joined New York-based architectural firm Webb & Knapp, Inc., as its director of architecture. In 1955 he left to start his own firm, I. M. Pei & Associates (now known as Pei Cobb Freed & Partners). One of his first major projects was the Mile High Center in Denver, Colorado. Pei also devised several urban renewal plans for areas of Washington, D.C., Boston and Philadelphia around this time.

In the years following the death of President John F. Kennedy, Pei met with his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, on the designs for his presidential library. The project, built in Dorchester, Massachusetts, met several challenges over the years, including a change in location. Completed in 1979, the library is a nine-story modern structure that features glass and concrete. Pei also designed a later addition to the site.

The Entrance of the Louvre, Paris of France

 
Following the dedication of the Kennedy library, Pei continued to create wondrous buildings around the world, including the west wing of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1980) and the Fragrant Hill Hotel in China (1983). In 1983, he was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize for his contributions to his field. In their official announcement, the committee recognized his ability to "draw together disparate people and disciplines to create an harmonious environment." Pei used his prize money to create a scholarship for Chinese students to study architecture in the United States.

During this time, Pei also began work on revitalizing Paris's Louvre museum. The new, and controversial, entrance he created for the world-famous structure has since become one of the most iconic representations of his work. Pei had visitors descend into the museum through a large glass pyramid, which took them to a new level below the existing courtyard.

The Museum of Islamic Art, Doha Port, Doha, Qatar

 
Pei continued to design impressive buildings during the 1990s, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. 

For more than 60 years, Pei has been one of the world's most sought-after architects and has handled a wide range of commercial, government and cultural projects. He created Chicago's Hyatt Center, completed in 2005, and the Musée d'Art Moderne in Kirchberg, Luxembourg, completed in 2006.

Now in his 90s, Pei still maintains an active work schedule. In India, he has several designs in process, including Mumbai's Lodha Place. He is also working on Los Angeles's Century Plaza, Fordham University's Lincoln Center Campus in New York and the Charles Darwin Centre in Darwin, Australia.

With a unique west-east perspective, Mr. Pei see the world differently. He said in one book: “In the West, a window is a window, it lets in light and fresh air. But to the Chinese, it's a picture frame. And the garden is always there.”

    
Learn more about I.M.Pei, please go to Bio.

China Dolls

See brings her “Sex and the City”-meets-historical-fiction act to World War II-era San Francisco, focusing on three young women who come up together on the “Chop Suey Circuit” — all-Asian nightclub shows for mostly white audiences. The setup is familiar, with each girl a type: Helen comes from the traditional family of a well-heeled Chinatown merchant; Grace escaped an abusive home in the Midwest; and Ruby is a scrappy climber, a Japanese dancer “passing” as Chinese. They pledge everlasting friendship to one another, only to see their bond suffer the ravages of fame, time and war, particularly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story

There’s also a boy to fight over, of course, and some serious spotlight hogging. The book can get a little soap-operatic, and each woman telling her story in the first person occasionally makes for some confusion, since none of their voices are truly distinct. The best bits come in the details, the way the girls simply accept being exoticized sex objects as the price of being an “Oriental” dancer — and often play to stereotypes in their desperation to be noticed. It all adds up to a fascinating portrait of life as a Chinese-American woman in the 1930s and ’40s.

Read more, please go to The New York Times.

CHINA DOLLS,by Lisa See
Random House, $27

Talk of The Town

Singer/composer Gao Xiaosong is the host of Morning Call

In 2012 Chinese talk show personality Da Peng became a sensation in the United States. Why? Because Conan O’Brien called him out for copying the opening sequence of his own nightly show. O’Brien took revenge by mimicking some of the sillier antics of the Chinese host, whose show is called Da Peng Debade.

But there’s rarely such a thing as bad publicity in the entertainment world. The ‘feud’ with Conan has made Da Peng a hit at home. His weekly talk show, which is only available online on Sohu, has picked up a huge following, and his programme, now in its seventh season, can boast almost 580 million views.

More generally, the internet has given Chinese talk shows a major boost. Traditionally, these shows have followed a similar format to those in the West, featuring a mix of interviews with celebrities and games involving the studio audience. Comedian Zhou Libo, who hosts the popular Mr Zhou Live Show, also seems to have taken his cue from late-night talk show personalities like David Letterman and Jay Leno.

“The talk show is not that simple. [To be successful,] it requires a host with an interesting personality, a TV station that is courageous enough to broadcast it and a community of TV viewers that is open-minded,” Zhang Yang, a former Shaanxi TV talk show host, told Beijing Youth Daily.

But when you are trying to do something a bit less formulaic, more receptive audiences are more likely to be found online, it seems. In fact, one talk show is so popular in that format that a regional satellite TV station has even purchased the rights to bring it to television.

Gao Xiaosong’s Xiao Shuo got its start on the internet two years ago. Against a simple studio backdrop, the show largely involves Gao talking to camera while he fans himself like an ancient poet. That may not sound the most exciting format, but the first two seasons of his weekly programme have been viewed over 400 million times on the online video site Youku, which also produces the series. China’s Variety named it the best original programming online last year. Zhejiang Satellite TV then purchased the TV rights and started airing it on primetime.

Initial expectations for Xiao Shuo weren’t stellar. For a start, Gao, 45, is not the most obvious choice as a host. With his goatee and long hair, he is better known as a musician (although he had appeared previously as a guest judge for reality singing competitions like Super Girl and China’s Got Talent). He has also dabbled in filmmaking and grabbed the headlines in 2011 for drunk-driving.

But as it turns out, Gao is rather well versed on a range of subjects from history to pop culture and sports. With his quick humour and swift analysis, he tackles a different issue every week. In a recent episode, he discussed the life of Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara, for instance. In another, he talked about the uncompromising work ethic of the Japanese.

The host, who has lived in the US, also likes to decode American behaviour for his Chinese audience. In an early episode, Gao explains why it was such a struggle for Washington to roll out healthcare reforms. “I once watched a debate between some important Congressmen on TV,” he recalls. “One of their arguments: ‘Why should we – people who work hard and pay our taxes – pay more taxes for those people who eat a lot and don’t exercise so that they can have health insurance?’” Read more,please go to Week in China.

Visual Interpreter of Chinese Culture

Recently, I am reading a book titled "Chip Kidd", and unexpectedly found a British artist who has created fabulous book covers for Penguin China. Here are some of them.

Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:
Chickens occasionally appear in Chinese ink painting, and I think the birds themselves have a certain arrogant, disgruntled look about them so….

 Kafka’s Metamorphosis:
This is a longhorn beetle, which I found in my garden. I’ve never seen a bug like it in the UK, so for me it is a very “Chinese” beetle. The Characters on it’s wing case spell out the book title.

Orwell’s 1984:
Taking 1984 to be a hell on earth, with Big Brother as a Chinese devil….

 Melville’s Moby Dick:
I have another version of this which looks more “Chinese”, the calligraphy making up the whales tale. Unfortunately that image was too dark for the series, so we’ve got…

 If you want to learn more about Jason Pym, please go to his blog.

The Scenic Route: Ming Cho Lee's Stage Life

Ming Cho Lee, theatricaldesign.nmhblogs.org

Called the "dean" of American scene design, Ming Cho Lee shaped the face and future of design in professional theater and opera in America beginning in the late 1960s through his work on Broadway, the New York Shakespeare Festival, and the Metropolitan Opera and by teaching design at the Yale School of Drama.

 Ming Cho Lee(李名觉) is considered to be the most influential stage designer in the United States in the past forty years, and one of the most respected designers in the world. He is one of  Tony Lifetime Achievement Award 2013 nominations.

Born on October 3, 1930, in Shanghai, China, Lee came from a wealthy family. His mother Tang Ying was a well-educated woman, and a member of high society in Shanghai. Tang, who also performed in some plays, often took her son to watch operas instilling in him a love of theater. She also arranged for him to be tutored by the well-known Chinese landscape painter Zhang Daqian. Lee's father was a 1919 Yale graduate who was in the international insurance business. When his parents divorced when he was six, Lee was sent to live with his father.

In 1948, Lee left Shanghai for Hong Kong with his father and completed high school there, but he was denied entry to the University of Hong Kong due to poor English skills. He then enrolled at Occidental College in Los Angeles, majoring in art so that he would not have too many English-language courses to pass. Because he came to the U.S. as a college student, Lee never felt like a part of the Chinese American community. "I never had experience of growing up as Chinese American or being part of a family who came over as true immigrants," he explains. "I never experienced that kind of prejudice. I was always accepted as a guest."

Lee then went to the University of Southern California (USC) to study film. During 1948 and 1949, he watched many films in Hong Kong where his uncle owned a film studio. But after studying film for a summer, Lee soon switched his major to speech at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) after deciding he would go into the theater, and his first scene design was for a 1951 student production of The Silver Whistle, a comedy by Robert McEnroe. He received his B.A. in theater in 1953 and continued to design as a graduate student at UCLA. He impressed stage lighting designer Eddie Kook, who recommended him to the famed New York designer Joe Mielziner. Mielziner hired Lee as his apprentice in 1954. After five years he became an assistant designer.

Stage models for Electra designed by Ming Cho Lee. Photos: Shi Hao

"Essentially, I spent eight years as an assistant designer, working for Jo and some other set designers, which is a longer period than many other American designers. That is because I didn't go to Yale, I didn't know a lot of people, and I was known only as an assistant designer," he said.

After a jobless year, he worked for the San Francisco Opera as an assistant designer. Later, he was interviewed, and hired by Joseph Papp from the New York Shakespeare Festival.

1962 saw Lee's first Broadway play The Moon Besieged as a scenic designer, and this was followed by more than 20 Broadway productions."The 12 years, from 1962 to 1973, working for Joseph Papp made me become a set designer in my own right," he said.

Because of his long interest in opera, Lee later designed for many opera houses including the New York City Opera, the Metropolitan Opera and the San Francisco Opera.

Now long retired from designing, Lee devotes his time to teaching and training. Many successful set designers active in the US and on the world stage today have received instruction from Lee.

To listen to what a master stage designer said about the scenic route.

An infrequent visitor to Shanghai, Lee returned to China mostly for work projects. In 1978 he visited Suzhou with a curator from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who was looking for inspiration for a traditional Chinese garden for an exhibition at the museum.

In 1994 Lee came to Shanghai to work on a production of The Joy Luck Club with the Shanghai People's Art Theater. And at the same time, he was designing Nine Songs with Taiwan's famous Cloud Gate Dance Theater (choreographed by Lin Huai-min), and spent this time shuttling back and forth between Shanghai and Taipei.

"I have been Americanized - strictly and completely. I am American educated and trained. I have forgotten my Chinese language, while in some way I'm still aware of my Chinese identity in the background." Lee admitted that as he got older, many of his Shanghai relatives suggested he should present his life's work to the people of his birthplace.

With regards to his inspiration Lee said: "I immerse myself in a story, and ideas emerge from that story as opposed to me contemplating a certain external look."

As the co-chairman of the Design Department at the Yale School of Drama since 1979 and one of the most influential set designers and mentors in the US today, Lee has worked on more than 200 shows including Broadway and off-Broadway productions, operas and dance events both in the US and overseas. In 1983 the Broadway production K2 earned him a Tony Award for Best Scenic Design. In 2002 he was also honored with the National Medal of Arts.

The Design of Ming Cho Lee by Delbert Unruh presents the designs of this widely regarded and well known theatrical designer, mentor, and teacher. Foreword by Jon Jory. The book contains lovely illustrations of set models, renderings, production photographs, and discusses the major designs of this widely regarded and well known theatrical designer, mentor, and teacher. The story of Mr. Lee's career is accompanied by a list of his production credits, awards and nominations, and memberships.

If you are interested in story about Ming Cho Lee, please visit china.org.cn

Bend, Not Break

Ping Fu, CEO of 3-D software company Geomagic, has also been a prisoner of Mao's Red Guard, a kidnapping victim, and an immigrant with $80 to her name. Here's how her unique past influenced her leadership style.   

When you speak with Ping Fu, the cofounder and CEO of 3-D software company Geomagic, you may not realize just how remarkable she is. Her company profile is impressive--Inc. named her “Entrepreneur of the Year” in 2005, she had a role in the creation of NCSA Mosaic (the forerunner of Netscape), and sits on President Obama’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship--but is nothing wholly unusual as far as accolades go. She passionately discusses her commitment to a future where everything is produced locally and individually, and, like most other entrepreneurs, the hardships she overcame on the way to success.  

 

But when Ping talks about difficulties, she isn’t referencing the lean times before Geomagic began to prosper. She’s describing growing up in the midst of China’s Cultural Revolution and being repeatedly raped and beaten by Mao’s Red Guard, all because she had the misfortune of being born into a well-educated family, a history she recounts in her recent book, Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds (Please notice: you must be enjoying her book if it is a fiction, unfortunately, it's a faked memoir, and is getting more and more bad reviews at Amazon.com). 

 

Image: Jonathan Fredin

Mao’s death improved Ping's lot, but her trials were not over yet. Her thesis on China’s one-child policy prompted China’s official press to comment for the first time on the increasingly common female infanticide in rural areas. Ping's research instigated an international controversy, leading to her imprisonment and exile.

At 25, Ping fled to the United States with $80 in her pocket. Kidnapped shortly after arriving in Albuquerque, Ping shouted one of the three English phrases she knew--“help”--through a barred window for days.

Ping's book details her path from factory worker to the successful CEO of a company that is moving the world towards a custom-made future. Fast Company recently spoke with Ping to learn how her unique past has influenced her leadership at Geomagic, and where she's taking the company next.

If you are interested in the interview Fast Company with her, please go to Bend, Not Break: Leadership Lessons For Resilience Amid Struggle to read more.