A comprehensive view of Lee's art was displayed in "Sets by Ming Cho Lee," a retrospective at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center— the same library that housed his first retrospective, in 1969. The Portfolio Review, which is closed to the public, allows young designers a chance to show their wares and schmooze with some of the best desingers in show business. Designed by L2 Interactive. [3], Lee was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1998,[4] and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2002. He numbers among his proteges many of the most prominent names in American design, including John Lee Beatty, Heidi Landesman, Michael Yeargan, Adrianne Lobel, Marjorie Bradley Kellogg and Douglas Schmidt. He has also designed sets for opera (including eight productions for the Metropolitan Opera and thirteen for the New York City Opera, ballet, and regional theatres such as Arena Stage, the Mark Taper Forum, and the Guthrie Theater. Lee completed high school in Hong Kong, but he was denied entry to the University of Hong Kong due to poor English skills. He impressed stage lighting designer Eddie Kook, who recommended him to the famed New York designer Joe Mielziner, who had designed such shows as Winterset, A Streetcar His New York design debut was in 1958 for Herbert Berghof's production of Cocteau's The Infernal Machine, which received poor reviews but was noted for its set design, which one critic said seemed "to echo the play's moral decay." Lee's father was a 1919 Yale graduate who was in the international insurance business. In succeeding years, Lee designed the NYSF's "Mobile Unit" theater, re-designed their playhouse in the park, and created scenic designs for over forty productions, while he was simultaneously principal designer for the Juilliard Opera Theatre and the American Opera Center of the Juilliard School of Music. His mother also provided him with the opportunity to study ink drawing and landscape painting with the watercolorist Change Kwo-Nyen. His mother, on his weekend visits with her, would take him to the theater, movies, and Chinese opera. [2] He is on the Board of Directors for The Actors Center in Manhattan. Lee's first Broadway play as Scenic Designer was The Moon Besieged in 1962; he went on to design the sets for over 20 Broadway shows, including Mother Courage and Her Children, King Lear, The Glass Menagerie, The Shadow Box, and For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. Lee completed high school in Hong Kong, but he was denied entry to the University of Hong Kong due to poor English skills. He designed over 30 productions for Joseph Papp at The Public Theater, including the original Off-Broadway production of Hair (musical). Retrieving performance data. Much of his early design work was thought to be in reaction to the more aesthetically luxuriant designs of his mentor, Mielziner, but it may also have been influenced by practical needs of the companies he was working for, which may have prompted him to find innovative ways to create the proper scenic environment. He is said to love teaching and rarely misses a class, even though it frequently meant a great deal of commuting. Lee brought a "new minimalism" to American stage design, characterized by austerity in color; the use of scaffolds, pipes, railings, and suggestive "set pieces" that localize each particular scene without being "realistic"; and abstract sculptural forms that create "environments" on stage rather than backgrounds. The young designer grew up in an environment where English was often spoken. Because he came to the U.S. as a college student, Lee never felt like a part of the Chinese American community. He is the former co-chair of the Design department of Yale School of Drama, and holds the Donald Oenslager Chair in Design. He readily admits to a "terrible Broadway career," adding almost jovially, "I've had more Broadway flops than anyone in the history of theatre…" However, Lee had many acclaimed Off-Broadway assignments, including Hair, a revival of The Crucible, and Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. and By continuing, you agree to our "Teaching forces a teacher to always go through a process of self-evaluation," he says. His important Broadway designs were The Shadow Box by Michael Cristofer and K2 by Patrick Meyers, the latter winning him the 1983 Tony award for best set design through its realistic rendering of a crevice of ice on the face one of the world's tallest mountains; the K2 design (originally created for the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.) consisted of sculpted styrofoam covered with layers of tissue, paint, and glue. About dance designing he said: "Dance [6], For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design, "Ming Cho Lee to Depart Yale School of Drama", http://www.obieawards.com/events/1990s/year-95/, AILF Immigrant Achievement Award biography, 1999, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ming_Cho_Lee&oldid=953103997, United States National Medal of Arts recipients, Articles containing Chinese-language text, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Cheryl Crawford / Equity Liberty Theatre /, This page was last edited on 25 April 2020, at 18:39. Information on Ming Cho Lee's career can be found in the Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia (1987) and in Lynn Pecktal's book Designing and Painting for the Theatre (1975). In 1949, he came to California to study at Occidental College … He then enrolled at Occidental College in Los Angeles, majoring in art so that he would not have too many English-language courses to pass. It was a very important opening of my eyes. He is the recipient of countless awards (including a Tony, Drama Desk, 1995 OBIE Award for Sustained Achievement and Outer Critics Circle), fellowships (including the Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts) and at least two honorary doctorates. [5] In 1995, he won the Obie Award for Sustained Excellence for his consistent and valuable contributions to the theatrical community. Because he came to the U.S. as a college student, Lee never felt like a part of the Chinese American community.

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