Lu Jie

ISEA2006 Address

Lu Jie  (born, in Fujian, China in 1964) holds a BFA from the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou and an MA from the Creative Curating Program at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has curated numerous contemporary art exhibitions internationally including the Chinese presentation at the 2005 Prague Biennale and the 2005 Yokohama Triennale. He is the founder and director of The Long March: A Walking Visual Display. Initiated in 2002, the curatorial project was conceived to take place along the route of Mao’s historic Long March, with exhibitions, performances, symposia and discussions taking place in public sites that were selected for their historical, political or cultural significance. The Long March is a multifaceted and complex art project in which the journeys through the realities of different social locations, contexts, and dimensions are part of a process of artistic experience and creation. The Long March acts not only as an art project but as a “transmediator,” a form of capital which offers a platform, context, and professional service for the realization and display of new media works, as well as a “glocalely” situated “social” as a new media. Thus far, artworks from The Long March: A Walking Visual Display have been exhibited in National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, 2004 Shanghai Biennale, 2004 Taipei Biennale, the 2005 Yokohama Triennale, Vancouver Art Gallery and the next Asia Pacific Triennale.
Lu Jie organized the first international curatorial symposium Curating in Chinese Context, in Zunyi, China, 2002, and has contributed to art conferences and seminars in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, and throughout Europe and North America. Lu Jie is a Gst Researcher at the Research Center of Display Culture, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China, and is on the Editorial Board of the Yishu – Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. He was a participant at the 19th transmediale festival (transmediale.06.)

Saskia Sassen

The City: Strategic Space/New Frontier

Saskia Sassen (born in The Hague, in The Netherlands) is an American sociologist and economist widely considered the leading authority on globalization and international human migration and coined the term “global city.” She spent a year each at the Université de Poitiers, France, the Università degli Studi di Roma, and the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires,  studyingphilosophy and political science. From 1969, Sassen studied sociology and economics at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, where she obtained M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in 1971 and 1974, respectively. In addition, she obtained a French master's degree in philosophy in Poitiers in 1974. She was also a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

Currently, Sassen is the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Her new book, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages is published by Princeton University Press. She has just completed a five-year project on sustainable human settlement for UNESCO, for which she set up a network of researchers and activists in over 30 countries; the project is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems by Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers. Her most recent books are the edited Global Networks, Linked Cities, published in New York and London by Routledge and the co-edited Digital Formations: New Architectures for Global Order published by Princeton University Press. The Global City came out in a new fully updated edition in 2001. Her books are translated into sixteen languages. She serves on several editorial boards and is an advisor to several international bodies. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, and Chair of the Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council (USA). Her comments have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, International Herald Tribune, Vanguardia, Clarin, and Financial Times, among others.