Description
Time And Rhythm Cinema Inc., fiscal sponsor The Film Collaborative, Inc.
Recommendation of a grant of $50,000 for the documentary film Joan Cohen: Painting the Chinese Dream
The lawyer and scholar Jerome Alan Cohen is well known for his pioneering work on East Asian legal studies and efforts to foster exchange between lawyers, judges, and scholars in the United States and Asian countries. Less well known outside art circles are the equally influential efforts of his wife Joan Lebold Cohen to build cultural bridges between the Asia (primarily China) and the U.S. The contributions of this dynamic duo are chronicled in “Charting New Frontiers,” a chapter in Terry Lautz’s recent book Americans in China: Encounters with the People’s Republic ((Oxford University Press, 2022).
The film that is the subject of this request would tell Joan Cohen’s story within the context of the larger story of artistic and cultural exchange in the years just following normalization of Sino-U.S. ties. Her lectures on Western modern art in early 1980s China left an indelible impression and inspired countless artists and scholars. One artist from southern China commented recently that she “brought water” to what at the time was a cultural desert. Herself a photographer, Cohen also thoroughly documented her activities in China and the people she met. Through her book The New Chinese Painting: 1949-1986 (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987) and early support for Chinese artists such as Ai Weiwei, Zhang Hongtu and Xu Bing as well as exhibitions, she was also instrumental in introducing contemporary Chinese art to American audiences.
Filmmaker Nicola Zavaglia and his team have interviewed the Cohens, now in their 90s, and have access to their papers and archival material. They have also interviewed artists in China and the U.S. and others who participated in what was a unique and important moment in people-to-people exchange that had a significant impact on the history of U.S.-China relations and Chinese contemporary art and art history. This project would serve as a nice visual art complement to documentation of early U.S.-China musical exchanges, an example of which is the Luce-supported film Beethoven in Beijing .
About $200,000 of the $280,000 budget has been raised to date. Our grant would assist with post-production of the film. Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies has agreed to distribute it. The Film Collaborative, Inc. will serve as fiscal sponsor.
