The Committee’s 20th Annual Conference Gala Dinner on May 12 in the Temple of Dendur, Metropolitan Museum of Art, will honor Liu He, Vice Chairman（Ministerial ranking）, Office of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs, and Communist Party of China Secretary and Vice President（Ministerial ranking, Development Research Center of the State Council, who will receive the Committee’s Leadership Award for Advancing U.S.-China Relations. The contemporary Chinese artist, Cai Guo-Qiang, will be given the Committee’s Chinese in America Achievement Award. Visit the conference website for the full agenda.
Liu He is a trusted advisor to China’s top leaders and at the center of China’s economic planning establishment, helping draft at least five of the last Five-Year Plans that guide China’s economy. Liu’s greatest contribution to the U.S.-China relationship is his role interpreting the global financial system to China’s leadership. Liu’s comfort with the American system stems from his studies at Seton Hall University’s Business School and the Masters of Public Administration he earned from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. According to Brookings Institution Research Director Cheng Li as quoted by Bloomberg News in 2009, “Liu He is one of only a few Chinese officials who can speak the language of international finance. He’s China’s Larry Summers [at that time Obama’s chief economic advisor]. Liu’s economic philosophy is pragmatism.” Liu participates in the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, a regular high-level meeting of American and Chinese policy-makers. It is the successor to the Strategic Economic Dialogue, which was inaugurated by the man who will also receive a 2011 C-100 Leadership Award for Advancing U.S.-China Relations on May 12, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (for coverage of Paulson and the other May 12 honoree, Laura Cha, see the January issue of Committee Bridges).
Cai Guo-Qiang is a world-renowned, New York-based artist whose work includes the fireworks displays and other special effects that stunned audiences watching the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. His media-crossing works include gunpowder drawings and performance art. In New York City alone, Cai’s work has been featured over the past few years in major exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum (I Want to Believe), Museum of Modern Art (Transient Rainbow), and Metropolitan Museum of Art (Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument). For the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening and closing ceremonies, Cai was Director of Visual and Special Effects. Cai’s series of firework displays throughout the city of Taipei on New Years Eve 2010 dramatically marked the beginning of the Republic of China’s Centennial. Cai began his artistic career in stage design for the Shanghai Theater Academy and left China in 1986 for Japan, where he spent nearly a decade developing his style. Since 1995, Cai has lived in New York City. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in October 2010, Cai said, “After 9/11, I realized I’m not a guest in New York City, and that New York is my home. With the burgeoning art scene in China, many Chinese-born artists have returned to their homeland, but I’ve insisted on staying in New York. No matter what you’ve done throughout the world, when you return to New York, you become a normal person again.” Cai’s arena today is indeed world-wide, with exhibitions last year in China, Italy, Singapore, Mexico, France, Australia, Taiwan, Japan, and the U.S. (a permanent gunpowder installation in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts), and his gunpowder paintings, some of which are massive in scale, have sold for many millions to collectors. Cai’s website captures the range and diversity of this highly productive artist.
Committee of 100 is an excellent organisation that is not only improving US-China relations but also helping people of both nations and at the same time encourages the employees by offering dinners and honour the officials...
Posted by: ריהוט משרדי | July 15, 2011 at 11:11 AM