Madeleine O'Dea Book Talk: The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern China
Madeleine O'Dea Book Talk: The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern China
Tuesday, April 3, 2018 Doors Open 7 p.m., Event Start 7:30 p.m. FCC members 100 / non-FCC members 150 price includes two beverages and snacks
Venue details: Kartel 5/F, 1 Xiangyang Bei Lu, near Julu Lu 襄阳北路1号5楼, 近巨鹿路 (15 mins walk from South Shaanxi Rd metro) Phone: 5404 2899
As a young foreign correspondent, Madeleine O’Dea arrived in China in 1986 to cover the "big story" of the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, but soon became caught up with another story lying beneath its surface, the story of China’s emerging artistic and intellectual avant-garde and their struggle for freedom of expression. Over the three decades that followed she came to realise how inextricably these two stories were linked and how the personal stories of China’s contemporary artists could also tell the story of the transformation of the nation.
In her historical memoir The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern China (Allen & Unwin 2017), she follows the stories of nine contemporary Chinese artists, showing how China’s rise unleashed creativity, thwarted hopes and sparked tensions between the individual and the state that continue to this day.
The book relates the amazing years of self-discovery and hope in the 1980s, which ended in the disaster of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Following that tragedy comes the story of China's meteoric economic rise, of the opportunities that emerged and the difficult compromises artists and others have to make to be citizens in modern China today.
The Shanghai FCC welcomes Madeleine O'Dea in conversation.