Half The Sky

About

Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KuBe Art Center presents Half the Sky, a group exhibiting featuring eleven groundbreaking Chinese artists, Cai Jin, Cui Fei, Edie Xu, Guo Zhen, Katinka Huang, Li Daiyun, Lin Tianmiao, Shen Ling, Yin Mei, Xiao Lu, Xing Fei.

In 1968, Chairman Mao Zedong famously proclaimed: “Women hold up half the sky.” It was more than a slogan, it was a political commitment by the People’s Republic of China to the essential role of women in society and revolution. This acknowledgment marked a significant cultural shift. Decades later art critic and curator Joan Lebold Cohen conceived an exhibition focused entirely on Chinese women artists—visionary practitioners too often overlooked in the male-dominated art world. Although the show was never realized at the time, it has now been brought to life by her son, Ethan Cohen, in collaboration with Donna Mikkelsen, Director, The KuBe Art Center.

Half the Sky is both an invocation and a reclamation, an exhibition of Chinese women artists whose work speaks to power, presence, and progress. It reflects our commitment to underrepresented voices and honors the legacy of Joan Lebold Cohen, a trailblazer in documenting Chinese contemporary art and amplifying women’s voices within it.

Each artist in this exhibition shares a distinct perspective shaped by lived experience, cultural memory, and contemporary aesthetics. Lin Tianmiao’s bicycle wrapped in white string meticulously challenges the viewer to ask the question why mummify a useful item so necessary and expensive in society? Cai Jin paints directly onto five bicycle seats, treating them as her canvas. Li Daiyun presents a monumental portrait of her nephew and his dog, painted in a grid-like formation using a dripping technique that evokes pixels – appearing abstract up close but coalescing into photographic clarity from afar. Shen Ling’s large yellow painting of a woman in her bedroom, created in 2005, functions as a social document of a moment when Chinese women were embracing personal freedoms – wearing makeup, jewelry, drinking Corona beer, and expressing sexual agency.

Cui Fei’s poetic work, composed of twigs sewn into the canvas, suggests writing with nature itself—bridging the organic world with the long tradition of Chinese ink painting. Xing Fei, an early graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and a member of the first generation of Chinese artists to emigrate to the United States in the 1980s, shares a suspended installation made of knitted ink forms and wire armature. The result is a walkable forest of calligraphy—weightless yet commanding. Yin Mei, renowned as both a dancer and choreographer, offers a monumental 40-foot-long scroll painted with her own body as brush, transforming movement into mark, gesture into narrative. Katinka Huang contributes two powerfully expressive paintings — intimate visual vignettes that merge emotion, memory, and a distinctive painterly language.

Edie Xu presents a futuristic installation in which fabric has been transfigured into hybrid forms—strange, tactile objects that seem at once natural and otherworldly. Xiao Lu shares her self-portraits, each captured and then violently interrupted —literally shot with a handgun, one for each year of a past relationship. The bullet-shattered glass and frames become a visceral confrontation with grief and trauma, turning personal catharsis into public reckoning. Guo Zhen, a graduate of the National Academy in Hangzhou and one of the early Chinese artists to establish herself in the United States during the 1980s, blends classical training with bold material experimentation. In recent years, she has expanded her practice through freehand tufting, creating life-sized portraits of gods and demons. Her four works on view depict the fierce goddess Kali, rendered with visceral intensity and mythic presence.

Together, these artists offer a dynamic and multilayered dialogue — intellectually engaged, emotionally resonant, and historically significant. Their work spans painting, installation, photography, sculpture, and performance, yet converges on themes of identity, resilience, transformation, and cultural memory.

Half The Sky is dedicated to Joan Lebold Cohen, a trailblazer in art education and culture dialogue between China and the United States. Joan, now, at 92, brings her vision to life alongside her son, Ethan Cohen, an international gallerist also renowned for his expertise in Chinese contemporary art. Together, they present Half the Sky. Powered by the Cohen Art Foundation, this exhibition represents a landmark moment for The KuBe Art Center and a reaffirmation of its mission to elevate vital voices and perspectives in contemporary art.