Art, Culture, and Self: East-West Differences
VIEW EVENT DETAILS
Morning Dialogue
Light Breakfast: 10:00am
Discussion: 10:30am
Close: 11:30am
In this morning dialogue, renowned author Gish Jen discusses the East-West differences in the self, and how these affect art and architecture. Drawing on a her recent book, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self, which was in turn based on the Massey Lectures in American Civilization she gave at Harvard University, Jen explores the psychic roots and aesthetic implications of the independent and interdependent self. These include her thoughts about our program venue itself — Asia Society Hong Kong Center, which was designed by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.
Gish Jen is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been awarded a Lannan Literary Award, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She is also the recipient of a Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the New Republic, the Paris Review, and Granta, and has been included in the Best American Short Stories series four times, including the Best American Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. She delivered the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University in 2012; these were published under the title Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. She has in addition published four novels and a collection of stories, and has a new book of nonfiction coming out from Knopf in February 2017. This is called The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap.