Institute of Chinese Studies Public Lecture - Dr. Jennifer Dorothy Lee - "Shuttered Eyes, Kinship Threads: Tracing Music and Migration in the Family of Yo-Yo Ma"

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What can a single photograph say? The black-and-white artefact featured in this talk, a product of the Nanjing Guanghua Photo Studio, shows a family like many others in 1946, caught between wars and continents. The figures pictured are musicians, primarily, but also teachers, scientists, and jacks-of-all-trades. They are the progenitors of the famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma, of his sister Yeou-Cheng, and of me. Drawing on lenses that range from music to art history to something akin to critical fabulation, I unfold the episodic, recursive process of unearthing my family history for the very first time. The process starts from initial encounters with a single photograph that cue a forensic exploration, compelling me to extract from handwritten letters, intimate anecdotes, musical manuscripts, and persistent memories. At certain points, through an historian's microscope, I reconstruct the spaces in which these familial figures lived and breathed. At other points, I activate imaginative techniques, such as the musical notations they leave behind, to piece together the facts and fabulations of the past.

Speaker:

Dr. Jennifer Dorothy Lee is Associate Professor of Art History, Theory, & Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Trained in comparative literature, Lee brings literary frames and methodologies to work with visual and material objects. Lee's first book, Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978–1985 (University of California Press, 2024) offers a sustained study of aesthetics, art, and subjectivity redefined in the historical moment bridging the Mao era with Dengist reforms. Lee's current book project, Diasporic Longing, explores belonging, displacement, and music from Asia to Europe among her family of musicians. Tracking her progenitors' wartime migrations amid 20th-century upheavals, Lee weaves biography, storytelling, fragments of poetry, and musical notation to revisit the meanings of diaspora across three continents. Lee holds a PhD in East Asian Studies from New York University, an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of London, and a BA in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Date: 24 September 2026 (Thursday)

Time: 4:45pm – 6:15pm (4:15pm: Tea Reception)

Venue: Activities Room, 2/F, Art Museum East Wing, CUHK

Language: English

Enquiry: 3943 5976/ ics-activities@cuhk.edu.hk