About the Artist Talk

Pixy Yijun Liao, Featured Artist

Pixy Yijun Liao has garnered awards and accolades for Experimental Relationship, an ongoing photography series begun in 2007. Collaborating with her Japanese boyfriend, Liao takes a skewered look at heterosexual relationships, often reversing the power dynamics between a man and a woman to humorous effect. Working in New York, her photographs contradict a recent trend in China in which traditional gender roles are being reinforced due to family pressure to marry and have a child by the age of 30 or else risk being considered a “leftover woman,” the term applied to educated single women living in Chinese urban centers.

Barbara Pollack, Guest Curator

Barbara Pollack is a New York-based independent curator, writer, and journalist, and a leading expert on contemporary Chinese art. She is the author of the critically acclaimed survey The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures in China (2010), and she writes regularly for The New York Times, Art in America, and ARTnews, among others. Pollack is the guest curator of We Chat: A Dialogue in Contemporary Chinese Art.

We Chat: A Dialogue in Contemporary Chinese Art is organized by the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut and is guest curated by Barbara Pollack.

The exhibition at Asia Society Texas Center is made possible through major support from Chinhui Juhn and Eddie Allen, Mary Lawrence Porter, the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance, Nancy C. Allen, Nancy and Robert J. Carney, The Clayton Fund, the Hearst Foundations, Reinnette and Stan Marek, and anonymous friends of Asia Society. Lead funding also provided by Leslie and Brad Bucher, Holland and Jereann Chaney, The Favrot Fund, Bebe Woolley and Dan Gorski, and Dorothy Carsey Sumner, with additional support provided by Olive M. Jenney. Funding is also provided by the Texas Commission on the Arts and through contributions from the Friends of Exhibitions, a premier group of individuals and organizations committed to bringing exceptional visual art to Asia Society Texas Center.

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