GREENWICH, CONN.- The Bruce Museum announces the opening of Tales of Two Cities: New York & Beijing on Saturday, May 3. This exhibition focuses on two of the world’s leading centers of art -- New York and Beijing -- and offers a visual pairing of five New York-based artists with five Beijing-based artists. The ten artists have been engaged in five different global, cross-cultural, artistic dialogues over the course of two years via email, Skype, and in-person meetings, sometimes with the assistance of translators, about issues ranging from political and social upheaval within their respective home nations, to the concept of global culture, to questions about their use of certain materials and techniques.

The concept for this show grew out of an earlier collaboration curated by Pan Qing at Columbia University’s Studio X in Beijing in 2010 between New York-based artist Michelle Fornabai and Beijing-based artist Qin Feng, both of whom are featured in the present show.

“Watching Michelle Fornabai and Qin Feng communicate silently through the brush helped to open my mind to the myriad possibilities of visual dialogues between artists from very different artistic backgrounds,” Qing explains. “After discussing this idea with the other curators and advisors of this exhibition — Michelle Y. Loh, John Rajchman and Sarah McNaughton — a decision was made to expand on this theme by seeking out more opportunities to pair artists from disparate cultures.”

The curators matched the pairs based partly on the kind of work that they do and their artistic processes, but more importantly on the type of dialogue in which they suspected the artists might engage within the context of their respective urban environments. Many of the ten artists are themselves peripatetic, on the move between global art centers, not only New York and Beijing, but also in Latin America and Europe.

Paired artists include:

Michelle Fornabai(NYC) and Qin Feng (Beijing)
Joan Snyder (NYC) and Wei Jia (Beijing)
Alois Kronschlaeger (NYC) and Lin Yan (Beijing)
Jorge Tacla (NYC) and Li Taihuan (Beijing)
Simon Lee (NYC) and Chen Shaoxiong (Beijing)

Selected artworks illustrate parallels between the pairs’ work and themes that arose during their conversations. Some of the artists are represented by existing or historic artworks, some have created new pieces for this exhibition, and some have collaborated to create site-specific work at the Museum. The works range from Joan Snyder’s My Pain Is No More Than Being’s Pain, which dates from 1983 and is in the Bruce Museum’s collection, to individual installations by paired artists Alois Kronschlaeger and Lin Yan that were created specifically to explore this exhibition space.

“We hope our viewers will examine the relationships between the artists,” says Susan Ball, Deputy Director of the Bruce Museum, “not only within each cross-cultural pair or among the group of 10 multi-national artists, but also more broadly as part of the larger geopolitical and aesthetic dialogue taking place between the two cultures.”