Latest news with #AiWeiwei
Globe and Mail
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Bob Rennie donates $22.8-million worth of contemporary art to National Gallery of Canada
Vancouver art collector Bob Rennie and his family have donated $22.8-million worth of contemporary art to the National Gallery of Canada, the gallery announced Monday. Rennie picked the gallery in Ottawa because he felt it has the resources to conserve and curate the art, and that a national institution was best placed to lend to regional institutions in Canada as well as making international loans. 'I looked at them as the right custodian,' Rennie said in an interview. A prominent international collector, he has given the gallery 61 works by such renowned artists as the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, the Palestinian-British installation artist Mona Hatoum and the American conceptual artist Dan Graham, who died in 2022. The donation also includes a career-spanning collection of 40 works by the Vancouver artist Rodney Graham, who also died in 2022 and was known for his large-scale photographic lightboxes. 'This is transformational for us,' said National Gallery director Jean-François Bélisle. 'It has been a dialogue about what do we want to add to the collection. His collection is a lot bigger than what he is donating to us right now. Not everything is on the table, but everything can be talked about: We really shaped this in terms of what would most benefit the national collection.' Bélisle added that the gift includes works that the gallery could never afford to buy and allows the gallery not only to lend to Canadian institutions but to enter into loan agreements with international institutions. For example, the U.S. National Gallery of Art in Washington is interested in borrowing one highlight of the gift: The American Library is a room-sized installation of 6,600 books wrapped in colourful African fabrics and bearing the names of notable American immigrants and Black Americans affected by the Great Migration. The piece was created by the British artist Yinka Shonibare, who explores the colonial relationships between Europe and Africa, and is known for his use of the bright Dutch-wax textiles once imported to Africa from the Netherlands. 'He could have given this collection to anyone in the world,' Bélisle said. The gallery, which already has one space named for the Rennie family, will name at least one more, as Rennie continues to discuss donating more of the collection. 'If you give to the National Gallery, you give to all galleries,' he said. 'If the National Gallery has them, the Art Gallery of Alberta doesn't need to buy them.' Rennie serves as chair of the collections committee at Washington's National Gallery of Art and previously served on committees at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Tate Modern in London. A collector with international reach, he was unlikely to make the gift to his local art museum: Rennie has been a vocal critic of the Vancouver Art Gallery's ambitious plans for a new building (now cancelled), saying it made bricks and mortar the priority instead of art. Unusually, the gift comes with no stipulation as to how or when it will be exhibited: Rennie said donors' requirements that their art be on permanent display tie a gallery's hands. 'I don't know if there is enough discussion about this,' he said, noting the pattern of donors' onerous requirements that he has witnessed in the U.S. 'You give one Monet; you want it displayed at all times. Everybody does that and you have no museum.' However, the gift does come with the expectation the National Gallery has the resources to lend the work. Rennie, who also gave about $12-million worth of art to the gallery in 2017 and has now donated a total of 260 works, has not endowed the gift with any cash contribution but has covered the costs associated with evaluating it and shipping it to Ottawa, Bélisle said. The $22.8-million figure is the evaluation approved by the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board, the organization that can issue Rennie with a tax receipt for that amount. Rennie added that he prefers to fund on a project basis, paying for catalogues and shipping when lending his art. For example, he has lent work and funded the catalogue for a coming exhibition devoted to the Black American artist Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy in London. The son of a Vancouver brewery truck driver and a homemaker, Rennie first bought a work of art at age 17 when he purchased a signed Norman Rockwell reproduction and had to borrow money from a neighbour to cover the shipping. He launched a highly successful career marketing real estate in Vancouver in his 20s, eventually becoming the city's 'condo king,' and began collecting in earnest. 'At what point are you a collector? When the works are stacked against the walls,' he said. His collection includes about 4,000 works by more than 400 artists. In the 1990s he preferred works that included text; in the 2000s, he began to specialize in works that dealt with social justice and artistic appropriation. Starting in 2009, he showed some of the collection in a private museum installed in the Wing Sang, the oldest building in Vancouver's Chinatown, but closed that project in 2022 and helped the Chinese community buy the building to create the new Chinese Canadian Museum. He has collected Canadian works in depth, including by B.C. artists Ian Wallace and Brian Jungen, but said he doesn't want to marginalize their work by placing it in a narrow national context. 'It is a Canadian collection, it's just not full of Canadian art,' he said. Similarly, he does not intentionally buy female artists but has 173 of them in the collection. Aged 69, he has three adult children by his ex-wife Mieko Izumi while another former partner, Carey Fouks, continues to oversee the art collection. Rennie has promised the family he will resolve the future of the collection by the time he turns 75. His plan is to donate art up to the $50-million mark with no stipulation that the National Gallery must show it or can't sell it. 'Will I roll over in my grave if they deaccession it? No. You have to trust someone if you marry them,' he said. 'Instead of my grandchildren saying, 'That's Bob's museum,' they can say Bob did something for the country.'
CTV News
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- CTV News
Vancouver businessman donates $22.8 million worth of artwork to National Gallery of Canada
The National Gallery of Canada has received a gift of 61 iconic contemporary artworks from Vancouver businessman Bob Rennie and the Rennie Family, valued at $22.8 million. The donation comprises of 40 works by Rodney Graham, 10 works by Mona Hatoum, pieces by Dan Graham, and three works by Ai Weiwei. Rennie started collecting when he was 17, and the collection has been put together with Carey Fouks. 'We have always thought about custodianship, which is about making sure that artists are seen and their voices are heard beyond their life and beyond my life,' Rennie said in a statement. 'This is foundational to the collection. The National Gallery of Canada shares our values and our intentions. Values of preservation, conservation and allowing the works to travel to museums and venues, which are not only across Canada but within the broad reach of relationships the Gallery has cultivated across the world.' Rodney Graham Rodney Graham, A Partial Overview of My Brief Modernist Career (2006–2009), 2006–09. Installation view, Rodney Graham: Collected Works, Rennie Museum, Vancouver, 2014. Gift of the Rennie Foundation, Vancouver, 2024. © Estate of Rodney Graham, Photo: Blaine Campbell. (National Gallery of Canada/submitted) Mona Hatoum Mona Hatoum, Undercurrent (red) [detail], 2008, ed. 1/3. Installation view, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin. Gift of the Rennie Foundation, Vancouver, 2024. © Mona Hatoum, Photo: Jörg von Bruchhausen, Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin | Paris. (National Gallery of Canada/submitted) Rennie and his family have now donated more than $35 million in gifts to the National Gallery of Canada, comprising over 260 artworks. In 2017, Rennie donated 197 paintings, sculptures and mixed-media pieces in celebration of Canada's 150th birthday. 'We are most grateful to Mr. Rennie for this major donation and for his trust in us to share stewardship of these works on behalf of Canadians,' said Paul Genest, chair of the board, and Jean-Francois Bélisle, Director and CEO, of the National Gallery of Canada. 'We also want to acknowledge the National Gallery of Canada Foundation, who works tirelessly to cultivate relationships with philanthropic partners who share our passion to bring people together, especially in these divisive times, through shared experiences through art.' Yinka Shonibare Yinka Shonibare, The American Library [La bibliothèque américaine], d'installation, When Home Won't Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. 2019–2020. Don de la Fondation Rennie, Vancouver, en 2024. © Yinka Shonibare ; photo : ICA, Boston/Charles Mayer. (National Gallery of Canada/submitted) The National Gallery of Canada says it will be able to make the collections available to Canadian and international museums in the future. The Upper Contemporary exhibition gallery at the National Gallery of Canada has previously been renamed the Rennie Gallery.
Business Insider
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
Lego my ego
If it weren't for the gallery assistant's haughty, dismissive tone, I probably would never have stolen the painting. To be clear, I'm not normally an art thief. My day jobs are as a civil rights lawyer and a law professor. Visual art is rarely my scene. So when my date invited me to see the Ai Weiwei exhibition in New York's Chelsea neighborhood this past winter, I wasn't exactly thrilled. But walking into the Vito Schnabel Gallery, I was enthralled by the artist's playful repurposing of — of all things — Lego blocks. The same plastic bricks that I'd used to make spaceships and castles on my childhood floor now hung up as high art, transformed into a neopointillistic reimagining of everything from Monet's "Water Lilies" to night-vision combat scenes. But it was the Warhol-esque quartet of self-portraits, with Ai's distinctive bearded silhouette reduced to four colors, that stunned me. They felt so human and so alien. I love that our brains are wired to find a clear face in such ambiguous masses of pixels. So I did something that you should never do in a New York art gallery: I asked the price. Art prices are the definition of irrationality. Quite literally, there's no inherent value, just what people are willing to pay. That's true to a degree for other goods, but rarely to this extreme. Stocks go up and down, but their price is often rooted in the expected performance of the company and other rational measures of future value. Currencies go up and down based on the fiscal prudence of their government's budgetary and monetary policy. But the art market is an ephemeral construction of hope and hype. A banana can be worth $6.2 million. A crude cartoon monkey can sell for $23 million one day and become virtually worthless the next. All that matters is what the buyer thinks. Maybe for buyers with billions in the bank, the gallery's prices were reasonable, rational. Maybe for those with art foundations and free-port tax schemes, this was a sound investment, especially from such a storied artist. I just didn't think the 30-by-30-inch sheet of Legos was worth 250,000 euros (maybe dollars are too pedestrian for art), no matter whose hand glued the blocks. Hearing the derision as the assistant named the price and added "plus tax," I felt like it was an "emperor has no clothes" moment. The picture was beautiful, but these were Lego bricks! I could spend the rest of my life in painting or sculpture classes and never be able to fabricate a Monet or recreate a Rodin. But Lego bricks? People say "my kid could make this" about so much modern art, dismissing the subtlety and nuance at the heart of so many works' beauty, but in the case of these toy bricks, I mean it literally. Seething from the assistant's condescension — his resentment at my gaucheness — I decided I would get even by using the one skill I've spent decades honing: the law. I, of course, wasn't going to swipe the art off the wall and spend between three and 15 years in prison. But what if I made a copy, not to sell (which could put me behind bars for five years for copyright infringement) but to comment on the absurdity of the inflated art market, and to question the very essence of what "authentic art" means? What if I copied the piece to write the article you're now reading, and it's the act of writing these words that helps prove the forgery was lawful? Through this legal alchemy, I could turn a crime into protected speech. I asked the gallery assistant whether it was OK to take a photo of the work. He said yes, probably thinking it was a consolation prize of sorts. In fact, it was just the first step. It took only a few minutes to crop the photo, look up the dimensions of the original, and print a full-size replica at a FedEx store. Then my online shopping spree began. For weeks, box after box of color-coded bulk Lego pieces would show up at my Brooklyn apartment. All told, it cost less than $250 (or 220 euros, for the non-Philistines). The thing I love about Lego-art forgery is that there's no guessing, no uncertainty. After I laid a transparent baseplate on top of the printout, the whole exercise simply became painting by numbers. Still, it took time. A 2 ½-foot Lego square includes 96 pieces per side, more than 9,200 pieces overall. It took weeks of trial and error to find the right colors and parts (or as close as I could get). Then I realized, infuriatingly, that for the work to hang without falling apart, I'd need to glue each piece in place, so I had to take it all apart and start again. I thought I could quickly Google what type of glue would hold the bricks best. Instead, I found myself lost down endless rabbitholes, reading diatribes from those who consider Lego Art a sin against the reusable plastic pieces and all they stood for. (Anti-glue folks: Please keep your powder dry before reading on.) Finally, last month, I picked it up from the framers: my one-of-a-kind forgery. You may think that copying Ai's work was wrong, or petty, or ridiculous. One thing you can't claim is that it's illegal. Building this work to comment on what I viewed as the farcical valuation of the original, and to educate my students and the public on copyright law is an act safeguarded by one of the cornerstones of free expression in the intellectual property age: fair use. "We often stand on the shoulders of others; we often need to copy in order to make our own points," Rebecca Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School, tells me. Fair use protects "uses that substantially benefit the public and that don't significantly harm copyright owners' incentives to create new works," she adds. In that way, my fake Ai Weiwei follows a long line of well-forged dissents. In 2021, for example, the Brooklyn arts collective Mschf purchased a $20,000 Andy Warhol print and then built a machine to make 999 forgeries. The group's so-called Museum of Forgeries then sold all 1,000 prints to the public, with no way for buyers to know whether they were buying a fine art "original" or a " worthless copy." There was a world of difference between the two, yet none was discernable. The group wanted to create a form of "provenance destruction," Kevin Wiesner, Mschf's co-chief creative officer, tells me, adding: "You should basically have no trust in anyone or any gallery that would try to claim it had the original of this Andy Warhol drawing." For Mschf, copying is a way to democratize art and make it more accessible. Still, he sees a real tension between artistic copying and the law, with the law slow to failing to keep up. Speaking about a Supreme Court decision in 2023 against Warhol's 1984 copying of a portrait of Prince, Wiesner expressed disbelief: "I can't believe that we're litigating this now about a silkscreen of a photograph of a person's face." Authenticity isn't just at the heart of art world valuation; it's become increasingly inescapable in much of the consumer goods landscape. Michael Weinberg, the executive director of NYU Law School's Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy, says fair use protects these complete acts of copying (as opposed to partial copies, like when a musician samples a short clip of a song). "When Google indexes a page for search, it copies the entire thing because it needs the entire thing," he says. "Similarly, if you are making a commentary about the importance of artistic provenance, your not-from-the-original-artist version needs to be identical to the original except for the fact that it comes from you and not Ai Weiwei." For me, having the piece on my wall feels like a bargain, but it raises a fundamental question about how we value art in the age of mass reproduction. If I took this piece to an auction house tomorrow, it'd be worth precisely $0. The real piece, which most collectors couldn't distinguish from mine, would sell for a tiny fortune. They're the same blocks, the same patterns, identical to the pixel, yet the valuation varies so radically. This is also my strongest legal defense for why this copy was fair use. Weinberg says: "Is anyone in the market for an Ai Weiwei Lego portrait going to buy yours instead? I think the answer is pretty clearly not. They are buying the piece because Ai Weiwei made it." It wasn't until I hung my impostor piece in my home office that I realized how it echoed so many of the same questions that Ai has raised in his work about the valuation of art. Ai came to prominence, in part, because of his work with "priceless" Chinese antiquities, painting one with a Coca-Cola logo, covering others in bright household paints, and simply smashing one 2,000-year-old urn on the ground. He has claimed art is "powerful only because someone thinks it's powerful and invests value in the object." While there's no world that I think my dinky Lego work lands within a million miles of Ai's work, there's a single thread of connection between them all: Why do we value what we value? Erin L. Thompson, a professor of art crime at John Jay College of the City University of New York system, tells me that it's never a simple question of which copying is illegal, because copying is how people learn. Instead, the legality of copying is a question of intent, she says, and "the exact same object" can be "entirely innocent in one context and then not in another." The knockoff purse that's a crime to sell online is an indispensable teaching tool in a fashion design course. The person I was most eager to ask this question to was the artist himself, and I was shocked when Ai Weiwei was generous enough to respond. To him, "all copying and imitation are neither beneficial nor harmful; they are simply one person's response to another," he tells me over email. "If an imitation does not add new meaning — whether by challenging or advancing the original concept of the artwork — then such imitation is, in effect, no imitation at all." Authenticity isn't just at the heart of art world valuation; it's become increasingly inescapable in much of the consumer goods landscape. It's everything from the dupe Birkin bag you see on the subway to the store-brand toothpaste we buy at the pharmacy. As it becomes easier and faster to copy more and more of the physical items that build multibillion-dollar brands, how much will those brands be worth? For many younger consumers, knockoffs are no longer shameful, but actually cool. According reporting from The Guardian, half of US consumers buy dupes for the savings, but nearly one in five just do even when cost isn't a barrier to the real thing. A social-media-fueled surge in imitation products — from Lululemon leggings to Bottega Veneta bags — has transformed what was once an act of economic desperation into a mark of savviness. "I think certain kids, maybe younger kids, don't care that much about if it's real or not," says Lukas Bentel, Mschf's chief creative officer. "They care about the image." Part of the reason for so much copying in fashion, in particular, is that the laws are surprisingly lax. No matter how much fashion brands may spend promoting high-end designs, beyond protecting their trademarks and logos, there's little they can do to prohibit a copycat. At the end of the day, when asked whether it's worth paying more for the "real" version, the "original" version, more consumers are resoundingly saying no. Maybe none of you reading this piece will ever end up hanging a forged artwork on your walls, but more and more of you will likely wear clothes, carry accessories, and buy home goods that aren't exactly the real thing. And as ever more forms of copying become quicker, easier, and cheaper, the army of dupes will only grow. But whether you value those items any less than the originals, that's up to you. My final question to Ai was what he thought of this whole enterprise, the copied art and this article. Sadly, my first review as an artist was hardly stellar. "On the surface, this stunt appears to be an act of non-action," he told me. "It is simply a personal journey undertaken in search of someone truly worth imitating. For me, this work holds little meaning."
Forbes
03-06-2025
- Forbes
Marina Tabassum's Serpentine Pavilion 2025 Explores Climate & Community
"A Capsule in Time" Serpentine Pavilion 2025 by Marina Tabassum The Serpentine Pavilion is a rare and thoughtful initiative—a space where ideas and drawings take physical form, then are experienced by a wide mix of people: gallery-goers, corporate types, school groups, joggers, dog walkers, passing tourists. This annual commission invites an architect (and sometimes an artist) to construct a temporary structure in the heart of Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park in London. And since its inception 25 years ago—with an impressive list of names to include Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei, Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen, Theaster Gates—the Pavilion has offered a stage for ideological and cultural expression, mirroring the shifting concerns of our collective consciousness. It brings critical thinking into physical space. Serpentine South gallery and "A Capsule in Time" Serpentine Pavilion 2025 by Marina Tabassum The Pavilions are often open, inviting spaces that encourage those who may not typically engage with architecture to experience design in an intimate, tangible way. We all have favorites (mine, the theatrical Theaster Gates of 2022), and many memories of meeting up with friends and family, attending talks and performances. This year's 'A Capsule in Time' hopes to do the same. Designed by architect and educator Marina Tabassum and her studio, Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA), the Pavilion centers on a courtyard built around a semi-mature, climate-resilient ginkgo tree, its axis aligned with the bell tower of the neighboring Serpentine South gallery. The capsule shaped Serpentine Pavilion 2025 by Marina Tabassum Drawing inspiration from Tabassum's native Bangladesh—from its culture of park-going to the arched garden canopies that filter soft daylight through green foliage—the structure shifts gently between interior and exterior, between material tactility and openness, light and shadow, height and volume. Built entirely from wood, light plays a pivotal role: a translucent façade scatters daylight as it enters the space—though on the wet, gloomy morning of the opening, I was left to imagine it all on a better day. There's also a kinetic element, with one of the capsule forms designed to shift and connect, gently reconfiguring the space and altering how we move through it. I met with the architect Marina Tabassum at the Serpentine Pavilion. Architect and educator Marina Tabassum Nargess Banks: What are your thoughts about the Serpentine Pavilion initiative, and the narrative built around the pavilions that came before you? Marina Tabassum: It's a very interesting way of showcasing architecture. In an architectural exhibition you have drawings and models and images that really don't make you feel what architecture does—until and unless you experience it. (With this initiative) the architect brings in their own ethos and practice and values when they come here and build something, which then immediately creates a kind of a connection with the practice and the people who are building it. In that sense, I think it's a nice way of showcasing architecture and inviting people who haven't built in London before to create something here. Light plays a critical role in Marina Tabassum's interpretation for this year's Serpentine Pavilion Banks: The Pavilion project may be impermanent but it does find a home and another life elsewhere at the end of its so-called residency in the fall. Am I right in thinking that the materials used for construction are locally sourced, and much of it reused? And secondly, the climate emergency has long been a lived reality in Bangladesh. How can architecture (temporary, mobile, public) help us confront that dissonance? Tabassum: The building has a second life and it doesn't end up in a landfill. And yes we have to source locally and think sustainability. For instance, the floor you see here seeps the water through, replenishing the water system underneath. The foundation that we've used is also a foundation that has been used previously in other pavilions. And then Serpentine itself is a free gallery, and the money that's raised from here (from the events during the summer) helps raise funds for the galleries. I think it's a nice sustainability model in that sense. And, you know, for us architects, for the last 25 years, it has turned into a sort of a legacy and to be a part of it is always wonderful. The Pavilion centers on a courtyard built around a semi-mature, climate-resilient ginkgo tree Banks: To my mind the Pavilion project is a wonderful stage for architects to visualize and communicate their ideas and ethos—perhaps even explore new avenues during and after the project. Do you dee the experience having an impact on your own work going forward? Tabassum: Every architect who has worked on this project has come with their own uniqueness, with their own stories. Each one is quite different and quite beautiful. And yes the process definitely impacts in some ways, and it manifests through other works too. You know, architecture is a journey. Concreteness wouldn't be interesting. Park life reflecting back on the wood Serpentine Pavilion by Marina Tabassum Banks: Your architecture is rooted in place—in climate, community and context. How do you transpose that ethos to the heart of London's Kensington Gardens, and what does it mean to bring a pavilion from Bangladesh to Britain, both symbolically and materially? Tabassum: I wanted to contextualise it: being in the park was important to me, as was the connection to the gallery. Our practice is very much based in the whole notion of sustainability and working with climate, especially in the Bangladesh context. I'm also trying to bring in my own understanding and my own ethos. There is the notion of light, which for me—coming from Bangladesh and being in a pavilion and in our context—the form is a nod to the shamas (lightweight, impermanent canopy structures). And consequently, the light and the colors that the structure gives is a sort of abstract way of bringing my own experiences in. Serpentine Pavilion 2025 by Marina Tabassum sits within Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park and by the Serpentine South gallery Banks: You've spoken of an 'architecture of relevance,' one that responds to urgency, not just aesthetics. In today's increasingly volatile political climate, where public space feels more contested than ever, what role do you see this year's Serpentine Pavilion playing, as a structure, but also as communicating other kinds of ways of us being together—of our humanity? Tabassum: A structure like this in architecture basically gives you a container, right? It's a space to come and congregate, to be here. And London has this possibility of bringing in diverse people with their own uniqueness to come and gather here. And you need to set aside all your differences in opinion and just to be here, be human in many ways. There's so much dialogue that can take place in this large, generous space. I really hope that this is what architecture does best: gives you a space, gives a platform where a lot of conversations can happen. And I really hope that this pavilion can generate that. Read more articles by Nargess Banks including Stockholm's Market Art Fair, a review of 'Typologien' at Fondazione Prada in Milan, and her year in art.
Forbes
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
A New Memoir Illuminates The Backstory Of Past US-China Relations
Insufficiently noticed is a recent book with unprecedented glimpses into the history of how the US helped open post-Maoist China to the world - and it couldn't be more timely. These days, the PRC's increasing footprint on the world stage has caught the attention of geostrategic observers concerned with power balances not just in Asia but across the continents. That's aside from Beijing's increasing leverage in global trade and technology. This book should therefore be required background reading for anyone wanting to know how China climbed out of the Cold War decades and entered the current era. 'Eastward Westward' by Professor Jerome Cohen is actually a personal memoir, a highly readable one that offers revealing windows onto multiple other crucial pieces of history than just US-China relations. Let me say upfront that, for some decades, I have known the author, now in his 90s and the father of an old friend, Ethan Cohen, a top New York gallerist who introduced artists like Ai Weiwei to America. And as in most such situations, out of respect one doesn't ask the parents of a friend too many detailed questions about their achievements, so Prof Cohen's astonishing presence in history remained largely unknown to me - until reading the memoir. That may seem a strange admission from your Forbes columnist of over 25 years, a widely published journalist about foreign affairs and co-author of two books on the Russia-China alliance. But it conforms with the reason why Jerome Cohen was so efficacious and influential - he worked quietly and tactfully behind the scenes on resolving the nuggety details of great global initiatives while politicians and diplomats got all the publicity. Cohen first enters history when, having edited the prestigious Yale Law Journal as a student in the 1950s he becomes clerk to two Supreme Court Justices in succession, one a Chief Justice, an unheard of achievement. And suddenly the reader has a glimpse of Washington at a pivotal time when the US was still simmering from the previous year's Brown vs Board of Education court precedent. Within a few years Jerome Cohen has won a Rockefeller Grant to research the laws of Communist China, an almost impossible task considering the tightly sealed status of the country in the 1960s. Cohen overcomes the virtually insuperable challenge by asking the Hong Kong police to present him with any escapee from the PRC, even those found floating in the harbor. 'I figured if anybody knew about China's legal system it would be those fleeing from justice' says Cohen. As a thirty-something he becomes a leading global expert in Chinese law and in the mid 1960s is teaching at Harvard. Over the years he expands the Chinese law department to become the East Asian Law department. The outsize influence of that department on the political affairs of the Far East has yet to be acknowledged. In 1969, he chairs a meeting of Harvard and MIT professors which produces a confidential memo to President Nixon to start secret talks with China. 'That was the origin of Henry Kissinger's famous 1971 visit', says Prof Cohen. (Kissinger had been a colleague at Harvard - the two had often discussed such a demarcate). Here then was Cohen's first great stealthy entry on his path of quietly realigning East-West relations at a fundamental level. During the next decades, he travels broadly in the Far East with his family. His wife Joan is, in the meantime, a leading cultural intellectual on the region's visual arts. At the start of Deng Xiao Ping's era she is quietly meeting top Chinese artists in Beijing in their homes to view and encourage the stirrings of independent art in China. Hence the family's friendship with Ai Weiwei and his ilk. She is the first Western woman to lecture top art college students on the outside world's contemporary work. In the years before and after, Prof Cohen has expanded the East Asian Law department at Harvard to take in the most accomplished young minds of the region. They, in turn, go on to high government positions in their countries. One shouldn't forget that for a large chunk of that time, polities like South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and the like struggled with military and autocratic leaders. Cohen's students undoubtedly helped change the political climate. Then in the 1990s, Prof Cohen again quietly enters the engine room of history, this time to thrash out a dependable commercial code for foreign investment in the PRC. He is helped by fellow lawyers, ex students and Beijing officials to lay down this most crucial of foundations. By then he is a senior partner at the law firm of Paul Weiss and brings the first heavy foreign corporation investment into China. (He later returns to academe as a law professor at New York University). From the time of Nixon onwards he helps high profile political prisoners find freedom starting with his old Yale classmate Tom Downey who joins the CIA in the 1950s, is dropped into Maoist China, gets quickly arrested and serves 18 years in prison before Cohen engineers his release. Cohen intervenes on behalf of Benigno Aquino of the Philippines, Kim Dae Jong of South Korea, Annette Lu of Taiwan, all who help guide their countries to liberal governance. More recently he helps get Ai Weiwei released from prison and the famous 'Barefoot' blind lawyer Chen Guangchen. Though doubtless still respected as a leading pioneer of their present prosperity, Prof Cohen's human rights activities have, perhaps, not endeared him to the current Beijing leadership. What then does he make of the present situation after all his years of opening China to the world? He has trenchant words against the current norm there of 'rule by law' rather than 'rule of law'. And he's a strong supporter of Taiwan especially because its example contradicts all those who argue that Western-style governance is antithetical to Chinese traditions. The chapter dealing with such questions is wonderfully titled 'The Curfew Tolls The Knell of Parting Day' from Thomas Gray's famous poem. He is ultimately optimistic about the future of China, characteristically because he feels that its young legal minds offer a reservoir of potential for guiding the country's path. But you will have to read the book for a full exposure to the chapter's wisdom and Jerome Cohen's 94 years worth of it.
