This exhibition is in partnership with the Shanghai Celebration. It is a year long festival hosted by over 30 San Francisco Bay Area institutions. The cornerstone event is the Asian Art Museum's Shanghai Exhibition.

Please visit: www.shanghaicelebration.com.

Sistercities: Dreaming alike oceans apart
Artist: Lynn Marie Kirby
Exhibition: May 6th - June 5, 2010
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 15, 5pm - 7pm
Guest curator: Justin Hoover

Lynn Marie Kirby is recognized as a member of a leading group of West Coast film and video artists in the 1990s that experimented with a new approach to film and video. Cinema Scope's Michael Sicinski refers to Kirby's work as a "unique  conjunction of conceptual rigour and investigative spirituality". Examples of her work will be featured in this exhibition which includes a video of children in San Francisco; the Listening Project which she conducted in Shanghai and her collaborative video with Shanghai artist Xiaofei Li. For the Listening Project, Kirby asked people she met to take her to sites they wished to share.  She listened with teenage girls and boys at a migrant children’s school, in parks and restaurants, to a classical dance performance and a mountain climber, university students in their classes and an eighty-five year old man who had been educated by French Jesuits before the “liberation”. She will be presenting evidence of these listening encounters in the gallery.

Kirby has been widely exhibited in the United States at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Portland Museum of Art; the Kennedy Center and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC; the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley; the Oakland Museum; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the de Young Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her work has been shown abroad in Sarajevo, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Athens, London and Toronto. She is a Professor at the California College of the Arts. Lynn studied at l’Ecole des Beaux Arts de Paris, also attending University in France and Sweden before receiving her BFA and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She currently lives and works in San Francisco.


sistercities: Dreaming alike oceans apart
Artist: Li Xiaofei
Exhibition: May 6th - June 5th, 2010
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 15th, 5pm - 7pm

Li Xiaofei is an artist and Art Director of the Fei Contemporary Art Center. In addition to his video, Li will exhibit a selection of abstract photographs. By combining dozens of small images into one larger picture plane, Li successfully flattens objects such as skyscrapers and freeways into seductive color field patterns. Li’s work has been exhibited extensively in China, Japan and Korea. He has also participated in art shows in France, Switzerland and Germany. He is a graduate of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine arts. Li currently lives and works in Shanghai, China.

Collaborative Work
While working on this exhibition, Kirby and Li communicated via email using Google translator, Mandarin to English and English to Mandarin. Based on this exchange, they created a video that document their poignant and comedic observations on the gaps between languages, cultures and contemporary technology.