Conversations on Urban China: Catherine Opie and Doug Aitken

Director of Critical Studies and MA/PhD programs in UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, Sylvia Lavin engages artists, architects, and curators in a series of lively discussions on how cities are increasingly molded by images rather than buildings; on whether art and architecture are converging to form an integrated type of cultural consumption; and if the concept of the masterpiece has finally been destroyed by the sheer quantity of global design production. 

Catherine Opie is engaged in issues of documentary photography and in how aspects of identity and collective behaviors are shaped by architecture. A Professor of Photography at UCLA, Opie was featured in a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008. Widely known for innovative installations such as Sleepwalkers, presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2007, Doug Aitken utilizes a wide array of media and artistic approaches, leading us into a world where time, space, and memory are fluid concepts.