Club Lunch – Like Ice, Like Fire: The Art of Liu Xia, with Nick Frisch

Liu Xia, born to a Communist cadre’s family in 1961 in Beijing, became one of the city’s preeminent experimental poets during China’s cultural and economic opening of the 1980s. Her marriage to Liu Xiaobo, a literary critic, dissident, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, led to more than a decade of harassment and extra-legal house arrest. During that time, her artistic oeuvre grew to include obliquely haunted paintings, photographs and poems. A year after her husband died from cancer in 2017, Liu Xia was released from house arrest and went into exile in Berlin. Her first interview abroad was with Nick Frisch, reporting for the New Yorker. Showing selections from Liu Xia’s art and poetry, Frisch will discuss her career living in the shadow of Liu Xiaobo and the state.

Nick Frisch is a media fellow at Yale Law School and Asian studies doctoral candidate at Yale University’s graduate school. He has reported from Asia for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and Foreign Affairs.