Moderated by Qingyun Ma, Dean of the USC School of Architecture

Along the Pacific Rim, two cities are focusing on their cultural programs with refined lenses: Los Angeles and Shanghai. These two cities represent polar ends of dealing with time in relation to culture. Institutions of visual and performing art in Los Angeles often rely on retrospective exhibitions, reprise performances or classic films, looking to their recent past to emphasize their youth as a city that emerged a mere 230 years ago. In stark contrast, China’s contemporary visual and performing artists generally look to their unknown future with imaginative utopias that express their regenerative urbanisms and identities in the a cross-generational variety of media, from craft like paintings to high tech digital work. Luping Yue, Director of the Xi’an Center for Modern Art, Sine Bepler, an arts and architecture critic and curator for ShanghART gallery, Olga Garay, Executive Director of the City of L.A’s Department of Cultural Affairs, James Elaine, Adjunct Curator at the Hammer Museum, and Shanghai-based artist Song Tao, whose photographic work explores the city’s landscape, join us for a cross-disciplinary—and cross-continental—discussion about the forces shaping the cultural lives of Shanghai and Los Angeles.

(This event is made possible, in part, by a grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation of Los Angeles.)