NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Chinese in America announces the major exhibition Stage Design by Ming Cho Lee, on view from April 28 through September 11, 2016.

Stage Design by Ming Cho Lee is a retrospective exhibition of celebrated and influential set designer Ming Cho Lee. The exhibition explores the evolution of his work in theater, opera, and dance, displaying the preparatory materials for his set designs alongside documentation of the performances, and chronicling the evolution of his practices, from his groundbreaking, abstract set designs of the 1960s and 1970s, to his more recent hard-edge treatments. Over 40 original maquettes are on view for the first time in New York since the 1990s.

“Ming Cho Lee has paved the way for generations of set designers; MOCA is honored to bring this retrospective to New York City—the center of the global theater community,” shared MOCA President, Nancy Yao Maasbach. “This exhibition aligns with our tradition of highlighting and contextualizing the work of pioneering Chinese cultural producers, while presenting an unmatched body of work.”

For over forty-five years, Ming Cho Lee has served on the faculty at Yale School of Drama, including as the co-chair of the design department. As a recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 2002 and The Tony Award® for Lifetime Achievement in 2013, Ming Cho Lee is one of the most acclaimed living set designers in the world.

This exhibition was developed by Ming Cho Lee and Betsy Lee and The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; Jacqueline Z. Davis, Barbara G and Lawrence A. Fleischman Executive Director; Barbara Stratyner, Judy R. and Alfred A. Resenberg Curator of Exhibitions, with Caitlin Whittington, Designer. The 1995 exhibition was developed by Robert Marx, then Executive Director and was designed and installed by The Library’s Shelby Cullom Davis Museum: Donald Vlack, Designer, Humberto Hernandez, Anthony Walcott, Herbert Ruiz, and René Ronda.

Since its development in 1995, the exhibition has traveled to Taiwan and China. Stage Designs by Ming Cho Lee was also on view in 2013 at Yale University in a jointly sponsored exhibition by Yale School of Architecture, the Yale School of Drama, and Yale College.

MING CHO LEE was born in Shanghai, China, in 1930; his father, Lee Tsu Fa, graduated from Yale in 1919. As a teenager Lee studied Chinese landscape painting; and in 1949, he came to the United States to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles. Initially interested in the art department, Lee found himself drawn to the theater, where he turned his talents to stage design.

Lee has designed sets for the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, Martha Graham, Pacific Northwest Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Joffrey Ballet, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (Taipei), the Public Theatre (New York Shakespeare Festival), major opera houses around the world, including Covent Garden (London), and most of the major regional theaters in the United States, in particular the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

His aesthetics and ideas, which include a passionate belief that art should be politically and socially engaging, continue to impact virtually every aspect of theater production and creation, a legacy perpetuated by his students and colleagues.