For the 5^th anniversary of the Beijing National Aquatics Center (commonly known as the Water Cube), New York and Beijing-based artist Jennifer Wen Ma and lighting designer Zheng Jianwei have been commissioned to create a permanent public art installation that will re-imagine the cellular “skin” of the iconic building. Nature and Man in Rhapsody of Light at the Water Cube is the fruit of their collaboration, melding contemporary technologywith ancient Chinese teachings from the I-Ching.

On the eve of the public launch of Nature and Man in Rhapsody of Light at the Water Cube, Jennifer Wen Ma and Zheng Jianwei will join art critic Pu Hong to discuss the Water Cube project as well as the current state of public art in China.

For more information about Nature and Man in Rhapsody of Light, please visit

http://littlemeat.net/pictures/water_cube.html

Jennifer Wen Ma was born in 1973 in Beijing, China. She moved to the United States in 1986 and received her MFA in 1999 from the Pratt Institute in New York. She currently splits her time between New York and Beijing. Ma’s interdisciplinary practice combines installation, video, drawing, fashion design, performance and public art, often bringing together unlikely elements to create poetic and poignant works.

Zheng Jianwei was born in 1969 in Beijing and graduated from Tsinghua University in 1993. Zheng is the founder and principal designer of Zheng Jianwei Lighting Studio, Beijing Institute of Architectural Design (BIAD). He was the first Chinese designer to win the prestigious Paul Waterbury Award of Excellence for Outdoor Lighting Design in 2009 from the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America for his design Seventh Courtyard for the Beijing Olympic Park. In 2011, his outdoor lighting fixture Shape of Light I—Flying received the Beijing Design Award.

Ren Zhong is an I-Ching scholar. Born into a family with a long history of I-Ching scholarship, Ren was certified as a Senior I-Ching Researcher by the I-Ching Study Center of Shandong University in 1995.

Steven Bleicher is Associate Dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and a tenured professor in the Visual Arts Department at Coastal Carolina University. In 2012, the second edition of his book Contemporary Color: Theory and Use was published by Cengage Press. Over the past decade, Steven has been a visiting lecturer and consultant on color psychology including a period as a visiting scholar at the Nanjing Art Institute.

Pu Hong is an art critic, curator and writer based in Beijing. He graduated from Tsinghua University with bachelor’s (2007) and master’s (2010) degrees in art history. From 2010 to 2013, Pu was a manager at Studio-X Beijing Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and has led a series of urban planning projects, workshops and research programs. He is currently a lecturer at the Department of Digital Art & Design in the School of Software and Microelectronics at Peking University.