Established in 2004, Birdhead is a well-known contemporary artist group composed of two artists Song Tao (b.1979) and Ji Weiyu (b.1980) who were born and live in Shanghai. They both graduated from Shanghai Art & Design Academy.Birdhead's early works mostly used teasing and subjective perspectives to record Shanghai's real urban daily life through a large number of snap photos, which made Birdhead a very representative local artist group in Shanghai. The artistic practice of Birdhead is based on photographs but also beyond the philosophy of photography. Capturing all the beings around them, Birdhead digests and applies the thinking mode of conceptual art into the context of their image interpretation. In recent years, Birdhead has increasingly emphasized the installation properties of the w...

Lai Yu Tong is an artist based in Singapore whose works span across image-making, painting, drawing and installation. His practice attempts to make sense of the world through acts of recording, arranging and storytelling. His recent works consider how art can evoke empathy in a world so damaged.Lai has presented his work at group exhibitions in Singapore and abroad, most recently at Plague Space (RUS) and Barely Art Fair (US); and held solo exhibitions in Singapore at Temporary Unit (2022), The Substation (2021), Comma Space (2020), and DECK (2019).Besides his art, Lai regularly publishes books under Thumb Books, his 2022 self-founded press that makes children’s books for both children and adults. Lai’s recent curatorial projects include Frida (2023), a project where he invites artists to ...

Apichatpong Weerasethakul (b. 1970, Bangkok) grew up in Khon Kaen in north-eastern Thailand, having graduated from School of the Art Institute of Chicago with Masters in Filmmaking, works and lives in Chiang Mai now. He began making films and short videos in 1994 and completed his first feature in 2000. He has also mounted exhibitions and installations in many countries since 1998. Weerasethakul is recognized as a major international filmmaker and visual artist. His works are characterized by their use of non-linear storytelling, often dealing with themes of memory, loss, identity, desire, and history. His works have won him widespread international recognition and numerous awards, including the Cannes Jury Prize in 2021 for Memoria, his first film shot outside of Thailand. He also won the...

Geng Jianyi was born in Zhengzhou, Henan province, China, in 1962. He graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Oil Painting Department in 1985, settling in Hangzhou where he lived and worked through to 2017. Geng Jianyi’s career began at the '85 New Wave, in an era marked new thinking about art and artistic expression that was unfolding across China, in which a number of artists in Hangzhou, especially those around Zhang Peili, played very important role. They were all keen to find new ways to express the enormous changes taking place around them, and in their own lives, through art that related to daily life as they saw and experienced it. Habits of looking observing and asking questions were practices that Geng Jianyi generally pursued throughout his career – as is exemplified i...

Liu Xiaohui was born in Shandong Province, China, in 1975, and moved to Beijing in 1991. He graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) High School, and subsequently got his bachelor and master degrees from CAFA. In 2007, he was invited to London for an exchange program. He currently teaches at the Mural Painting Department of CAFA. Practicing primarily as a painter, Liu centers the structure of his practice closely around life, taking it as the source of clue (or path). By employing a painterly language and tireless repeating analysis of color, the artist both affirms and denies perennially the immediate experience. He constantly deliberates and refines non-referring subject matters and ordinary scenes. Finally, Liu aims at accurate expression of truth from an oriental view via per...

Han Feng, b.1972, currently lives and works in Berlin & Shanghai. His work involves multiple mediums, such as painting, and installation. His works are often inspired by daily objects, exploring the abstract structure of the objects themselves on the canvas， or translating the understanding of the structure into the installations, to show the traditional and natural phenomena in continued evolution. His works attempt to express their daily reflective rules via the recording of the process and construct more spaces for different cognitive gatherings in the presentation of his works.In 2010, Han Feng won the first prize of "the 1st John Moores New Painting Prize", in Shanghai. In 2011, his works were exhibited in "the 3rd Biennial at the End of the World", Ushuaia, Argentina. In 2012, Han ha...

Tang Maohong simultaneously references and undermines art history and popular culture. He has integrated a variety of visual elements and subject matters, producing works that inhabit the ever-blurred border between fine art and popular art. His work is absurd, magical, humorous and confrontational, hinting that the juxtapositions of figurative objects might be more than just illusions. Tang Maohong's pictorial universe reflects not only a new subject – a psyche whose internal eclectic imagination is echoed in the environment of constantly flowing images – but also the inversion of out-grown traditions."Faced with various contemporary economic and political issues, I can't avoid and thus respond by making some restrained narratives in the form of illustrations. Presenting the plot that is ...

Hu Wei, born in 1989 in Dalian, graduated from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Oil Painting Department in 2012, and obtained his MA in Fine Art at Dutch Art Institute in 2016, currently lives and works in Beijing.Working in a variety of media including film making, installation, printed images, performance and drawing, Hu Wei explores the precarious relationship between labour, affect, and value judgments in different political and economic environments, technological conditions, and events. Recent exhibitions include: Touching A Fabric of Holes, Macalline Art Center, Beijing (2023); In Solidarity with____ ?, OCAT × KADIST Emerging Media Artist Program, OCAT, Shanghai (2022); Hu Wei: Affairs, DRC No.12, Beijing (2022); Diving Deep for Light into Darkness, Beiqiu Museum of Contempor...

Li Dezhuang, also known as Lee Teck Suan, was born in Singapore in 1953. Winner of the 2023 64th Chinese Literature and Art Medal (Taiwan), Li Dezhuang studied western art and graduated from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1970. As a modern poet, columnist and Chartered Fellow (FCILT), his varied experience provided him with a diverse perspective.      Li’s landmark “Well M Farmland” (Jing Shan Tian) series draws from his study of Chinese Han characters. Combining the most representative Chinese characters井 (well), 山 (mountain), 田 (farmland) with three basic geometric shapes: circle, triangle and square to represent each of the Chinese character, Li created this contemporary ‘new ink painting’.

Geng Dayou (1998) is an artist who currently lives and works in Shanghai. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from King's College London and a Master's degree in Contemporary Art from the Sotheby's Institute of Art in London.Geng Dayou's artistic practice revolves around exploring hidden emotions and collective memories within public domains. He employs various mediums such as installations, video, sound, video games etc., to recreate multiple scenarios with a touch of absurd humor and theatricality. Through his work, he extracts and distills various paradoxes of modernity.Recent Solo Exhibition: “When no one is around, dance gracefully” , at ShanghArt Gallery (Shanghai, M50).

Chen Xiaoyun was born in 1971 in Hubei, now works and resides in Hangzhou. Chen Xiaoyun's works are always both artistic and poetic in style, with introspective thinking present in the narrative structure as well as the use of individual fragments of consciousness to channel the real world in pictorial form. His works usually start with a caption, a dialogue, or a motion that is then overlapped, refined, and abstracted, to make our known world more ridiculous, hesitant, and emptier. Since his participation in the group exhibition “Art for Sale” held in Shanghai in 1999, he started his contemporary art creation and practice in video art, and has become one of the most important experimental artists in China.His recent solo exhibitions include: Arrival, ShanghART Beijing, Beijing (2018); 106...

Xiao Wenjie (b. 1982, Hong Kong) studied at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute from 2002 to 2005. He currently lives and works in Beijing.

Born in 1977, Zhang Qing is one of the prominent Shanghai experimental artists, now he works and lives in Shanghai. Early stage engaged with performance art of absurdity and humorous violence, then evolved into a sophisticated interpretation of video and installation, his work articulates the blurred boundary and route between reality and fiction, absurdity and reasonableness. Quoted from Harald Szeemann, "Vehicles bordering on the absurd – that is the strength of Zhang Qing. At the same time he is concerned with defaulting perception by way of exaggeration." Since 2006, Zhang Qing has deployed the perspective of surveillance as his artistic language until now through the study of video, installation and mixed media. He manoeuvres these differentiated medium, techniques and rendering metho...

Ouyang Chun was born in the 1970s and grew up in Xi’an. Having drifted away from the academic art education system, his experience of self-education determined his independent and versatile creative powers. Since becoming a professional artist in Beijing at 28, he has created works of painting, installation and sculpture, and draws inspirations from the contradiction and uneasiness brought on by the social upheavals of contemporary China. The subjects of Ouyang Chun’s paintings returned from the allegorical worlds of the early years to his personal experiences, juxtaposing worlds of fiction and reality, while pursuing absolute painting experience with his brushstrokes. His complicated life experiences and affection for the reality have contributed to his unique insight into the material wo...

Sun Yitian (b.1991, Zhejiang, China) graduated from the Painting Department of China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA) in 2015 and earned her Master Degree in 2018. She is now completing her doctorate of Literature at the School of Humanities at Tsinghua University, Beijing. Her practice, which spans painting, installation, performance, and fashion, employs material objects as metaphors of labor and production to reveal the inner mechanisms of our consumer society. Sun's often photo-realist works examines the secret, increasingly tenuous connection between seduction and fear as well as the sculptural ‘thingness’ of her subjects.Sun was selected for the Influential 2023: Forbes China Contemporary Young Artists and Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia Class of 2019, and received the K11 Artist...

In his artistic practice, Pu Jie attempts to use fragments of collective memory as well as his own personal experiences to compose a narrative of a contemporary way of existence in the shadow of China's recent past. Avoiding trappings of both nostalgia and amnesia, he references instead life in the rapidly expanding urban metropolis and its oscillating imageries of eroticism, political propaganda and ancient myths. Monochromatic colors in red, yellow and blue dominate his large-scale paintings. The compositions are not subject to the classical central perspective, but consist of collage figures and texts that are noticeable as vast bases in favor of other images, usually painted with striking contours. The different layers of imagery are brought together in the picture by the unifying aest...

Michael Dean (b. 1977 Newcastle upon Tyne, now lives and works in London) starts his work with writing - which then abstracted into human-scale sculptures, using industrial and daily materials such as concrete, steel, padlocks, papers. Dean explores the three-dimensional possibilities of language by ‘spelling out’ his words through the alphabet of concrete sculptures, the contagion of stickers, dyed books, casts of his and his families’ fists and fingers. Dean’s practice is not about presenting readable words, but rather about a disclosure of the personal, striking something in equality between the author and the viewer while placing the people in front of the work. Dean will have a solo exhibition at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Newcastle, UK) in 2018 and a solo exhibition at the M...

Jiang Pengyi was born in Yuanjiang, Hunan Province in 1977, graduated from the China Academy of Art, and currently lives and works in Beijing. He creates a kind of surreal spectacle and delicate narration of the scene, mostly, by photo and video, to reveal the barriers and confusions of the individuals.Recent exhibitions include: Jiang Pengyi: The Monument Bestowed by Desolation to Solitude, ShanghART, Beijing (2024); Laozi’s Furnace, White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2024); An Atlas of the Difficult World, Macalline Center of Art, Beijing (2024); Glitch, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2024); Jiang Pengyi: Streams over the Serried Stones, Honin Art Center, Chengdu (2022); Jiang Pengyi: Firescribbling, Xie Gallery, ChangshaJiang; Pengyi: Birds Bring Forth the Sun, ShanghART...

Wu Shangcong (b. 1989, Chengdu, Sichuan Province) received his BFA in Furniture Design from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, in 2015, and his MFA from the Sculpture Department, Studio 3, at the same institution in 2021. He is based in Beijing.

Luo Zidan is a seasoned performance artists from Sizhuan. He was born 1971 in the small Sichuan town of Luzhou. After graduating from high school in 1989 Luo entered the Sichuan Fine Arts College. In 1991 he began to experiment with various art mediums. In the early 90's he moved to Beijing and lived in the artists community of Yuanmingyuan (Sommer Palace). Today he lives again in Chengdu. Luo Zidan has over 50 performances to his credit.The exhibition at Shanghart (bldg 16) features the oil paintings Luo Zidan created during his stay in Yuanmingyuan artists village in the early and mid 90's. They are his last paintings he created before dedicating himself exclusively to performance art. Included in the exhibition are also documents of Luo Zidan's performance from the same time.

The practice of Ding Yi encompasses painting, sculpture, spatial installation and architecture. He works primarily with “+”and its variant “x” as formal visual signals, above and against the political and social allegories typical of painting in China. He chose this sign in the second half of the 80s as a synonym of structure, rationality and of a pictorial expressiveness that reflects the essence of things.Ding Yi has exhibited extensively at various institutions and galleries, among many others, The British Museum (London, 2021); M+ Museum (Hong Kong, 2021); Power Station of Art (Shanghai, 2020); San Francisco MoMA (2018-2019); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York/Bilbao, 2017-2018); Daimler Contemporary (Berlin, 2017); Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2015); Lehmbruck Museum (Duisburg, 2015); ...

In recent years, Ji Wenyu has continued to create "Kitsch Art", similar to his previous works, with the collaboration and help of his wife Zhu Weibing. Their soft fabric sculpture provides insight into the unique charm of another art language. This form seems "the only one" of its kind in the contemporary art world. It is not by chance that they chose cloth as a medium. Zhu Weibing has been engaged in the clothing design industry for a long time now. The cloth is soft, gentle, and easy to shape. It corresponds with and mirrors Ji Wenyu's personality and art spirit as well. Through their own idea, design, and handmade production, using different characteristics of different cloth textures, the couple builds a landscape style garden with a stage like display, and typical "Chinese" puppets. T...

In the graphic world of Zhao Yang, it is common to find virtual figures and absurd images in the same painting, while each of them respectively represents different ideas, which strengthen the visual appealing by highlighting contradictions. Implicit and dramatic elements always get united in the flat space-time created by him. His paintings wander among reality, Eastern and Western fairy tales, as well as fables, transform them into metaphors and symbols, and finally present the hybrid images to the audience. Figures in Zhao Yang’s paintings are always strange, even hilarious. They stand like monuments on the paintings, transmitting nihilism and romanticism. The diversity and identity of painting are controlled within a region of conflict and anxiety by the artist.Zhao Yang always paints ...

Gao Lei's art practice spans multiple media, including installation, sculpture, photography, and painting. Gao often adopts everyday objects and "standardized" industrial products as the essential component, whose works are manipulated through synthetic or abstract regulatory forms, in which the functions, properties, and meanings are tampered with or added through blurring transformation. Thus, they become a scale or model for measuring various domains such as the body, power, consumption, and religion. Through precise material testing and vectorization of graphics, Gao's works, along with the objects they confront and the questions raised, alternate between spatial and conceptual dimensions, allowing the viewer to re-examine and remeasure our inherent boundaries with the world using a st...

Chen Yanyin graduated from the Sculpture Department of the China National Academy of Fine Arts in 1988. In the following years she participated frequently in avant-garde and woman art exhibitions in Shanghai and around the world. Chen Yanyin created many of the prominent sculptures on Shanghai’s streets and places. In 2008, Chen Yanyin’s received the “China Sculpture Grand Prize” for her work “My Mother 1956, 1963, 1998”. Recently some of Chen Yanyins works have been shown at Myth/History in Shanghai's YUZ museum..

Lu Yu (b. 1997, Chengdu, Sichuan) currently works and resides in Shanghai and Chengdu. In 2019, she graduated from Pratt Institute with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree. Sojourned in cities such as New York, Vancouver, Seoul, and Shanghai, Lu gained firsthand insights into the lifestyles and societal perspectives shaped by various cultures and historical backgrounds. The word ‘epidemiology’ has its roots in the study of what happens to a population. Lu investigates societal diseases rooted within individuals by the methods of epidemiological studies. Utilizing mixed media, she attempts to elucidate the relevant causes, symptoms, complications, and treatments of these societal epidemics, particularly within the East Asian cultural context.

YANG Zhenzhong (b. 1968) is an artist from Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, currently based in Shanghai. YANG’s artistic practice mainly focuses on conceptual art, involving video, photography, installation, painting, sculpture, and other art forms. He has been active in the global contemporary art scene for a long time and participated twice in the Venice Biennale (2003 and 2007). Furthermore, as a curator, he has planned and initiated more than a dozen crucial contemporary art exhibitions and projects with artists in Shanghai since the late 1990s, including "Art For Sale" "Express Art Exhibition" "Hipic" and so on. On the one hand, YANG’s creations center around life and death with his cynical attitude to reinforce the numerous contradictions and disorders existing in society; on the other h...

Works from different artists (go to 'available works' for images and further infos)

'In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.’ This is my favourite line from the German poet Novalis. I also depict the same harmony in my paintings, which is both vague and clear. I use ‘fluid colours’ and let them penetrate, flow and superimpose on the canvas to produce a very emotive picture. They are derived from my senses and feelings; sometimes I can't control my desire for clarity, and thus construct some order in this perceptual and fluid picture. I consider it a particular kind of ‘confusing certainty’.——He WeiHe Wei’s mysterious abstractions investigate interior landscapes of the mind and heart. Through a process of applying many translucent layers of oil paint onto canvases lying on the floor random expressionistic color fields are created sometimes with brok...

“The Grand Voyage” is a long term creative project founded by GUO Xi and ZHANG Jianling, and supported by Imagokinetics Lab in Hangzhou. In 2014, the artist duo compiled and released 12 prophecies. And then they began a long voyage to witness the prophecies, collecting evidence and stories along the way to bring back to the mainland. The artists try to work on the edge of fiction and reality, presenting the audience with a narrative maze of works of art, objects and text.Guo XiHe was born in Yan Cheng, Jiangsu Province in 1988. After graduation from Department of New Media Art of China Academy of Art in 2010, he joined a two-year program at the Rijksakademie in Netherlands as artist-in-residence. In 2015, he graduated from New York University with Master of Fine Arts degree. What Xi is mai...

Su Chang (b. 1985) was born and raised in Shanghai. He graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Shanghai Normal University in 2007. Su Chang employs sculpture as a means of artistic experimentation, emphasizing a reevaluation of the intrinsic nature of the medium throughout his ongoing work. He aims to digest and create a new visual language based on ordinary elements. Through his artworks, Su Chang examines the fluctuation of individuals within the intersection of public and personal anxieties, as well as the psychological imprints left by such ambiguous behaviors.His recent solo exhibitions include "Su Chang: Across" at ShanghART Westbund, Shanghai(2024);"Breathe Continuously" at Fosun Foundation, Shanghai (2021); "Hole" at ShanghART M50, Shanghai (2021); "Sculptural Practice" at We...

Zhang Enli was born in Jilin province in 1965. He graduated from Wuxi Technical University, Arts and Design Institute in 1989. Zhang currently is living and working in Shanghai. Mundane objects and the traces of daily life activities are the dominant depicted subjects in Zhang Enli’s works. The muted tones and loose washes of paint intertwine with the expressive lines and curves that make the objects seem removed as if occupying a liminal reality where only the essence of the object is portrayed on the canvas. In his series of installations, known as Space Paintings, he creates the immersive space that suspends the audience into the void of time and space by incorporating with environment, history, and personal experience. Zhang Enli’s depiction on the prosaic aspects of contemporary life ...

Yan Bing was born in 1980 in Tianshui, Gansu Province, China and graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2007, 3rd Studio of the Oil Painting Department. He lives and works in Beijing. Yan Bing directly uses ordinary or even primitive everyday objects as materials in his creation of different medium, and probes their spiritual dimension through painting. Hidden behind the prosaic items of daily life he depicts is his own perception of life. The emotions revealed in Yan Bing's works are complex, while the simplicity is permeated with his sentiment and speculation, pain and joy. These works exuding an ancient quality reflects the artist’s profound thinking about the relationship between his personal experience and the current living world.Recent solo exhibitions include: Yan Bing: Pea...

KAN Xuan was born in 1972, Xuancheng, Anhui Province. She is a visual artist whose work primarily takes the form of video, as well as photography and installation. She graduated from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou in 1997 and completed a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. She was a recipient of Holland’s Prix de Rome in 2005. Now she divides her time between Beijing and Amsterdam.

Armenian painter Armen Eloyan has swathed ‘figuration-as-we-know-it’ in a loud and greasy perverse painterly realm, carrying the viewer towards that last grain of bare and violent vulgarity, which one sometimes - in a horrifying unguarded moment - recognizes in oneself. The act of painting with the whole body - rather than with the wrist alone - is not only a manner of expression but it becomes a risky enterprise of dangerous yet funny acrobatics, as if one were running in too big shoes. The artist devotes himself to pictorial research with what is for many a touching and authentic dedication but, balancing between an apparent unpredictability and purposefulness, his large-scale pictures are often based on the conscious study of the colour scheme and composition of constructivist examples....

Wang Guangyi's aesthetic entails sampling a variety of imagery - such as well-known propaganda images and photographs - and fusing them with corporate brand names in order to undermine their original purpose. In combining ideology and advertisement, he criticizes the apparent' truths' of both. In short, he brands Socialist Realist iconography and symbols with a different contradictory discursive system. The paintings are meant to highlight the fact that despite no overt relationship, the principal goal of both is to convince the population of the authenticity and singularity of its products. The artistic strategy produces imagery on different levels, both symbolic and real, visualizing and actively counteracting key economic paradigms and their social and cultural implications.Wang Guangyi...

Shi Yong is a representative figure of contemporary Chinese artists who first started working with installation and video media. Since 1993, his works have been widely exhibited both in China and abroad. His artworks cover a wide range of mediums including performance, video, and installation. Shi Yong’s earliest artistic practices focused on revealing the subtlety of our reality and the inherent tension of the "system". At the end of the 1990s, Shi began focusing on the idea of Shanghai’s transformations under the Chinese economic reform, which contributed to a discussion of globalization and consumerism. Since 2006, with the piece "Sorry, There will be no Documenta in 2007", he turned his attention to the art world that he's been involved in, pondering how to provide a more rational pers...

In a series of photographs entitled "Rock Never" (2001), Xiang Liqing presents a reaction to changes brought on by the transformation of space and its potential uses in the metropolis. Today, rigid high-rises have pushed horizontally structured communities into vertical organization of order and control. Xiang Liqing's photographic images with their grid-like facades of contemporary residential buildings scrutinize these symbols of architectural master planning. Yet, the strength of this work rests on its ambivalence: as one reads the pictures closely, one reaches the understanding that all individual, but similar, apartments serve as habitats for real people–the image shows the dichotomy between the public masses and private space. Architecture is presented as a carrier of social desire, ...

Lynn Hershman Leeson's (b.1941) artistic practice spans more than five decades and is internationally acclaimed for her art and films. As one of the earliest new media vanguard artists, Hershman Leeson is widely known for her innovative work investigating issues that are now recognized as key to the workings of society: the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. Over the decades, she has made pioneering contributions to the fields of photography, video, film, performance, installation and interactive as well as net-based media art.great interview in Artforum https://www.artforum.com/video/lynn-hershman-leeson-under-the-influence-1234728198/Her recent solo exhibitions incl...

Xu He, lives and works in Beijing and Berlin. With a background shaped by both Chinese and German education and life experiences, his artistic practice integrates abstract and chaotic imagery, striking a balance within diverse cultural contexts and forming a distinctive personal language.The era in which he grew up instilled in him a deep sense of unease, which runs throughout his work. His creations often explore themes of identity, social development, and technological transformation, delving into the complex interplay between individual experience and collective memory.Xu emphasizes the inevitability of conflict in both artistic creation and reality. Through the processes of deconstructing and reconstructing images and social narratives, he critically examines the history, shaping a vis...

Yuan Yuan has established a style of Realist paintings of often austere, sombre architectural interiors with sophisticated brushstrokes, reinterpreting Classical techniques with modern sensibilities. His work gives off a certain intrigue created by the blurred dichotomy between the real and the psychological, the tactile and the immaterial, the personal and the collectively shared. He has produced an oeuvre that tries to bridge the individual and the collective, and that is materialized in the poetic uncanniness of memory. Yuan Yuan was born in Hangzhou in 1973. Yuan Yuan studied in the Oil Painting Department of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1996 and a Master of Fine Arts in 2008. Recent exhibition including: There is no there there, Mali...

The figures in Jin Weihong's paintings are surprisingly gentle and relaxed, detached from all the desires and demands of any ordinary human in the modern world. Though seemingly female they are truly androgynous, or at least they are supposed to seem so. Going against traditional painting patterns and context, their distinct loneliness is an everlasting search of the artist for ego and humanity.Sexless, and thus lonely, Jin's human figures project a personification of her own anxieties. Deprived of certain body features and sensitive details, they are cold and rational. Works like this have led the artist to even more creations of self-reflection, with two assembled human bodies simultaneously depending and lingering on each other sans emotion. It is common for artists to mirror their own ...

Liu Yue, born in 1981, is a Shanghai-based artist. He explores the realm of objective subjects in his works, employing a profound intervention of cognitive experiences. This approach infuses his research process with a sense of agnosticism and the unknown. Liu Yue's works challenge cognitive limitations by creating a paradoxical logic, resulting in a strong anti-materiality between the subject of cognition and the contextual clues. This paradoxical relationship generates curiosity among observers as they observe the interplay between the overall context and the specific elements within the cognitive process, with the potential for falsification. Through extreme extrapolations, cracks emerge in the process of cognition, allowing for the extraction and purification of "impurities" from the e...

Liu Yi was born in 1990 in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, and currently lives in Hangzhou. She graduated from the China Academy of Art with a master's degree. Her practice primarily focuses on ink animation, integrated with diverse mediums such as installations, music, and stage performances, to explore the perceptual boundaries of ink art within a contemporary context. Liu's works reveal the subtle and hidden interactions between individuals and their surrounding environments and investigate the complex multi-layered emotions that lie beneath daily experiences. Her work always creates a poetic resonance that traverses time and geography, reality and dreams.Liu Yi's video works and installations have been exhibited in renowned museums and institutions worldwide, including the Animist Tallinn F...

Hu Xiangcheng, a pioneer of China contemporary art, has dedicated his life to delving into and pushing the boundaries of art. Born in Shanghai in 1950, Hu graduated from the Shanghai Theater Academy (STA) in 1976. His academic journey continued as he shared his knowledge with students at his former school and Tibet University. In the mid-1980s, Hu set his sights on Japan to further his artistic studies and pursuits. After earning his qualifications in 1991, he embarked on a global odyssey, traversing Africa, Europe, and the Americas to deepen his artistic research. Upon his return to China in 2000, he shifted his focus to rural revitalization efforts in the Jiangnan region. By 2012, he had fully recommitted himself to artmaking. Hu Xiangcheng’s oeuvre is a tapestry woven from the rich thre...

Han Mengyun (b. 1989 in Wuhan, raised in Shenzhen, China) is an interdisciplinary and multimedia artist, comparatist, filmmaker, poet and mother currently based in London. She received BA in Studio Art from Bard College and has pursued the study of Sanskrit at various institutions such as Kyoto University before she completed her MFA at the University of Oxford with a research focus on Classical Indology and Indian aesthetic theories. Her practice is metaphorically divided between "day" and "night," exploring a wide range of themes from the decolonization of Eurasian transcultural hybridizations to personal experiences as a woman and mother.Her recent exhibitions include "What Migrates Shall Remain" (ZHI Art Museum, Chengdu, 2024); "The Unending Rose" (ShanghART, Shanghai, 2023); "Night" (...

A particularly generative aspect of Lu Chunsheng's work is the way it breaches the boundary between documentary and fiction. His conceptual and methodological coherence broadens and extends the inquiry into everyday life rather than merely illustrate it. Lu Chunsheng is now focusing on photography and video art. In his work, he articulates a surrealistic and neutral attitude in his videos. Using fixed camera positions, endless drawn-out shots and unprofessional shooting techniques, he documents human behavior in bizarre situations. But unlike many of his fellow artists emerging from the same generation, he does not focus on the alienation following an accelerated urbanization (including its stream of rapidly moving images and perplexed inhabitants). Instead, he has developed an oeuvre that...

Zhou Zixi created his characteristic approach of allegorical narrative, absurd visual expression and subtle landscape line drawing, and unceasingly pursued hidden facts through his works. He presents seemingly insoluble complex entanglement between ideology and personal experiences from multi-levels, and multi-points. In his works, he usually switches implicit, ambiguous, and isolated collage images to some positions in different spaces, in order to trigger accidental and unexpected visual encounters; he also gives common forms symbolic meanings, to reveal some thorny significance. His recent works captures daily scenes of various classes in China, as well as various cross-sectional profiles as basic elements, and the final presentations are fragmentary yet vast, complicated yet furious, t...

Singaporean visual artist Robert Zhao Renhui (b. 1983) works chiefly with photography but often adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, presenting images together with documents and objects in the form of textual and media analysis, video and photography projects. His artistic practice investigates man’s relationship with nature, utilizing convincing narratives to invoke doubts in its audience towards the concept of truth and its portrayal. His works has been exhibited globally, including solo exhibitions in Singapore, China, Japan, Australia, Italy, and U.S.A., as well as participating in various biennales and photo festivals.He represented Singapore in their national pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Recent exhibitions include 14th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2023);...

In the beginning of his artistic career in the late 80's, Zeng Fanzhi painted apocalyptic, expressionist images, thus manipulating modernist compositional effects to intensify his sinister version of reality. His representational work reveals the place of the unconscious and aberrant in the construction of experience. The over-sized, clenched hands of his subjects are almost more remarkable than their stereotyped faces and wide-open eyes. Zeng Fanzhi's art simulates the fatigue of the contemporary experience: the rush to acquire and consume to the point of alienation and detachment. Working in idiosyncratic ways, he reminds us how effective art can be when it collapses these various experiences. He traces the eruption of the corporeal into the optical sedition of visual art. Zeng Fanzhi's ...

Lv Yan (b. 1981, Tangshan, Hebei Province) graduated from the Oil Painting Department, Studio 4, at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, in 2005. He currently lives and works in Beijing.

New York School abstract painter David Diao’s early works of the 1960s and 1970s are characterized by an earnest desire to contribute to the Modernist canon, while questioning its lineage and theoretical underpinnings. Early influences were Barnett Newman, a significant figure through Diao’s career, and the hard-edge painter Al Held. By the early seventies, Diao’s formalism was inflected with the social, cultural, and political. This has remained the primary preoccupation of Diao’s work ever since. However, in the mid-eighties, Diao’s style shifted radically, as he began incorporating silkscreened images, vinyl lettering, hand-drawn marker, and painted words, detailing his personal life and practice. Combining his radical formalism with avant-garde iconography, identity politics, and autob...

Liang Shaoji was born in Shanghai in 1945. From 1986 to 1989, Liang Shaoji studied soft sculpture from Maryn Varbanov at China Academy of Art who was one of the world's leading tapestries. In the late 1980s, Liang started experimenting with silkworms. For more than thirty years, he has been indulged in the interdisciplinary creation in terms of art and biology, installation and sculpture, new media and textile. His Nature Series sees the life process of silkworms as creation medium, the interaction in natural world as his artistic language, time and life as the essential idea. His works are fulfilled with a sense of meditation, philosophy and poetry while illustrating the inherent beauty of silk.Selected exhibitions: Liang Shaoji: Phantasmagoria - Annealing 2024, Shanghai Museum of Glass, ...

Shi Qing, born in 1969 in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, lived and worked in Beijing for almost two decades before moving to Shanghai. Shi Qing's work is hard to categorize and always evolves in both media and methodological tools of perception. From behavioral analysis of psychology to study of geopolitical conflict in the globalized world, from socialist cultural heritage to actual geographical environment in the nomadic space, a wide range of topics have come under his attention. His recent projects are more focused on everyday life politics and artistic production relations.Selection exhibitions: Interrupted Meals, How Art Museum, Shanghai (2020); The Common Space: The Grand Canal Narrative of The Post Intangible Heritage Era, Beijing Times Art Museum, Beijing (2019); Re-assessment of Post-Gl...

Yao Qingmei (born in 1982 in Zhejiang) currently lives and works in Paris. Her practice focuses primarily on performance,  video and related installation, incorporating elements of scenography, costumes, texts, lectures, games, sound poetry, and contemporary choreography. By intervening in specific spaces, she disrupts established rules, explores the symbols of everyday life, and examines how bodies nurtured by these symbols gain or lose power, breaking the boundaries between performance and its setting.Her works often use displacement, metaphor, and allegory to question the mechanisms of political and social issues, revealing a tension of confrontation rooted in serious critique yet tinged with burlesque and lightness. She seeks to stimulate collisions between different modes of language,...

Nan Xi (original name Wang Rongqiang) was born in Zhejiang Yongkang in 1980. Painter and curator, lives in Hong Kong and Beijing now.

Yu Youhan was born in 1943 in Shanghai, where he continues to live till his death in 2023. He graduated from the Central Academy of Art and Design, Beijing in 1973.One of the most important and influential artists in China, Yu Youhan’s artistic practice dates back to the 1970s, while the 1980s is widely considered the beginning of Chinese contemporary art. As a leading pioneer of Chinese abstract painting and political pop movement, Yu's oeuvre combines multiple perspectives, investigating the structure of cultural identity in China through various pictorial techniques. His paintings—ubiquitous yet intriguing—has had a major impact on the art scene, and inspired a younger generation of artists.Yu represented China at the 22nd São Paulo Biennale, Brazil (1994), the 45th Venice Biennale (199...

Born in 1968 in Xichang City, Sichuan Province, China;Graduated from  Department Fine Arts of Southwest Normal University in 1991;Now lives and works in Chengdu, China.Solo ExhibitionDetour, Eli Klein Gallery, New York, USA (2023);Just Follow Your Heart, He Duoling Museum, Chengdu (2022);Anonymous, A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu (2019);Darkness in the Light, Surplus Space, Wuhan (2017);Genealogy of Techniques: Form, Conception and Cognition-Painting Practices of He Duoling and Xiao Kegang, Today Art Museum, Beijing (2013);The Peach Garden of Travelling: Untimely Painting, Art Museum of Sichuan University, Chengdu (2011);Still Sensations: Xiao Kegang & Luo Yinglong, A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu (2007).Group ExhibitionsArt Gallery’s Eyes—Season Five, Sichuan Art M...

Yang Fudong was born in Beijing in 1971 and now lives and works in Shanghai. He graduated from the Department of Oil Painting, China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Yang is among the most important Chinese artists today. He started by creating video works in the late 1990s before working on a wide range of mediums, including photographs, paintings, films, and installations. His works explore the structures and forms of identities in myths, personal memories, and life experiences while providing a unique visual interpretation of the subject from multiple cultural perspectives that transcend time and space.Yang has participated in prestigious international art exhibitions, including Thailand Biennale, Korat (2021); Suzhou Museum (2019); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2017); Foundation Louis Vuitt...

Born in 1977, lives and works in Shanghai.Xu Zhen has been considered as an iconic figure in Chinese contemporary art. His practice covers various media such as photography, installations, video, painting and performance. Xu Zhen’s works express not only the tendency of performativity but also contain a strong conceptual meaning and narrative in multiple themes and events. Xu Zhen usually directly uses the “body” - his body or the body of society - as the symbolic material. With an ironic way that tends to challenge the authority, the work reflects the individual experience of the artist and the social-political situation in China.Aside from being an artist, Xu Zhen is also a curator and the founder of MadeIn Company. As the co-organizer, Xu Zhen established Bizart Art Center in 1998, the ...

CAO Shu lives and works in Hangzhou.His works are based on local practices, intricately weaving together the complex production mechanisms behind computer graphics technology, mythical metaphors, historical archives, and social issues. The art works primarily focus on narrative 3D digital moving image, video games, and site-specific installations.In recent years, Cao Shu has won such awards as 2022 OCAT x KADIST Emerging Media Artist Award，2024 Chengdu International Photograph Week Artist award，2021 Exposure Award of Photofairs Shanghai,and 2017 BISFF Award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement.He has been residency artist at Atelier Mondial in Basel(2017), Yokohama Koganecho Bazzaar (2019),Muffatwek Munich and Goethe Institute(2023). The Works are collected by KADIST Art Foundation, Austra...

Tang Guo has been able to create a very unique universe within the traditional media of ink painting and calligraphy. Only lately has he expanded into the world of photography and so forth. In his paintings, water, pulp and color are the basic elements out of which a rigorous and poetic pictorial proposal is made. Although at first glance it may suggest certain similarities with abstract expressionism, this soon gives way to meticulous and warm compositions. Ranging in size from the miniscule to the large, Tang Guo's abstract paintings of monochromatic fields change gradually from profound meanings to intense shades of distinct colors, it has a traditional charm and a contemporary visual style; Tang Guo shows a clear interest in the relationship between color fields that mix and interact, ...

Consumerism becomes a belief system in Ji Wenyu's vibrant, detailed, yet saturated images. Revolution, market economy, and art history are alienated and stripped of their original meaning. In his emblematic paintings, Ji Wenyu contrasts communist propaganda imagery of workers and peasants in heroic poses with Western brand-name product logos. Here, political propaganda works mutually with Western marketing's promises of happiness, which the artist, ironically, presents to the public of a radically changing China. By juxtaposing images and icons of the stereotyped oriental and the assumed occidental, Ji Wenyu questions the politics of cultural representation. Ji Wenyu's works are full of surprises and reference both political occurrences and cultural productions while also focusing on the d...

Shao Yi's meticulously made objects operate on the threshold between sculpture, installation art etc. In many of the works, the unexpected combination of stylistically distinct objects and material suggest various kinds of personal and mythical relationships. Combined together, these objects and paintings comprise subtle geometries and impartial perspectives.Shao Yi's recent works mainly focus on the discovery and the use of new textures and material. Beginning in 2011, the artist purchased a piece of safety glass, smashed it into small pieces and initiated his new series of works, including 12x12x12, Hong, Parabola and so forth. Shao Yi produces these geometrical patterns or words, starting from a single point, an angle or for example from details of a particular side. The pieces of glass...

Li Shan is a Chinese contemporary artist and a pioneer of Bio-Art (shengwu yishu). He was born in Lanxi, Heilongjiang Province in 1942, studied at the Shanghai Theater Academy 1964-68 and later taught there until his retirement in 2002. In the 1960s he started to engage in contemporary art. He lives and works in Shanghai and New York now. Li Shan was also one of the main participants in the Chinese '85s New Wave Art Movement. In 1993, Li began investigations on life science through his art. Based on molecular biology, he completed the first-ever genetic Bio-Art project Reading in 1998 and published the article The Story of Fish and Butterfly in 2000. Solo exhibitions: Decoding, ShanghART, Shanghai (2019); PSA Collection Series, Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2017); Reading Li Shan, MOCA,...

Lin Aojie, born in Guangzhou in 1986, graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Oil Painting Department in 2010. He lives in Guangzhou, currently working in Beijing and Shanghai.Presented through video, photography, painting, text, etc., Lin Aojie’s artistic practice departs from his personal experiences. The artist has a keen and delicate record of the trivial details of daily life or deliberately planned events with strongly improvisatory and humorous images, while a seemingly dispassionate tone threads the whole narrative structure. By beating around the bush he tries to question, ridicule and criticize the capitalist mode of production, artist's survival predicament and the relationship between artists and other art professionals.Recent solo exhibitions include: Lin Aojie: Playing...

Since the early 1990s, Wu Yiming has been ceaselessly focusing on ink painting. Now it comes to light that the artist’s early painting occurred against the background of an era that witnessed the collision of Chinese modern ink painting and Western painting. Ink painting, as a means of artistic expression, was on one hand facing the dilemma of surmounting the bond of tradition, and on the other in need of a resolution by criticism of and learning from realism, abstract art, and expressionism in western art history. WU Yiming and the artists of his generation shouldered from the very beginning the mission to reconcile the conflict between Chinese and Western painting. Moreover, he drifted between the traditional spirit and modernism, which constituted precisely the unique style and quality ...

Zhao Bandi has made his reputation with staged scenarios where he and his toy panda play out everyday situations. Sometimes these consist of scenes from the life of a single father. Other times, the panda assumes the role of partner and lover. The panda is treated and acts as a 'real' character with a voice of its own that appears as speech bubbles in the photos. Zhao Bandi is brilliant at both playing with and being played by the media culture. The works are humorous, subversive, critical and seductive. Addressing the idea of media and mass reproduction, Zhao Bandi suggests that the boundary between image and reality has broken down. He emphasizes the images' potential for transformation, but also the power of the manipulating gesture: it takes so little to change the value and significan...

Guo Xi was born in Yancheng in 1988. After graduation from New Media Art Department of CAA in Hangzhou in 2010, Guo Xi joined a two-year residency program at the Rijksakademie in Netherlands. In 2015, he got from MFA degree in Studio Art from NYU.Guo Xi likens an artist’ s work to an act of “piercing”, making little pores on the hard husk of ideologies, through which people will be given a chance to glance at the Truth hidden within. In his view, the visual form is a medium for the transmission of message, and that justifies his extensive use of a variety of artistic forms, such as installation, painting, performance, sculpture, text, et cetera, to try to convey his messages as faithfully as possible.

Boedi Widjaja's (b. 1975, Indonesia/Singapore) practice contemplates on house, home and homeland through long-running, interdisciplinary series developed in parallel. His approach is often autobiographical and oblique. Drawing as method is a defining element in his practice; expressed through diverse media from experimental photography and architectural installations to bio art and live art, with an emphasis on process and bodily engagement. Widjaja was trained in architecture and has worked in graphic design.Widjaja received the inaugural QAGOMA and Singapore Art Museum co-commission for his Black–Hut series, presented at the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial (2018-19) and the 6th Singapore Biennale (2019-20). His works have been included in international group shows such as Thailand Biennale: T...

Melati Suryodarmo's work is the result of ongoing research in the movements of the body and its relationship to the self and the world. These are enshrined in photography, translated into choreographed dances, enacted in video or executed in live performances. Her work is known for long durational performances, influenced by Butoh, dance, and history, among others. By compiling, extracting, conceptualising and translating some of these factors of presence that she recognises into her work, she intends to tease open the fluid border between the body and its environment, expressing her concerns about the cultural, societal, and political dimensions. Suryodarmo has performed across the world for 20 years, in Art Festivals, Biennials and museums. Her works have been collected by many internati...

Li Pinghu engages equally in video, painting, and photography, combining various styles, and he is as much a realist as an abstractionist. In Knowledge Changes Destiny (2010) and The Man on the Telephone (2010) the figures are vivid and intense, yet you never really identify or empathize with them as individuals. Perhaps they are not intended to be individuals at all, but to function as representatives of society, with a pervasive air of cool detachment and emotional reserve. Much as the figures participate, they remain uncomfortably solitary, embedded in their own private, unfathomable psyches. His work is characterized by a restrained technique that is also swift, dry, and minimal, as if under pressure to leave only what is necessary.His newest (2010) series of paintings titled Facetia (...

Song Tao's film noir "Three Days Ago" (2005) is a poetic venture into the nighttime terrain of Shanghai. Along the way, the viewer glimpses certain recurring leitmotivs, such as a child playing hopscotch, a brightly lit highway tunnel and a haunting building. An electronic score that plays throughout lends the film a flowing rhythm all its own. The loop-like structure encourages the viewer to focus increasingly on the atmosphere rather than over-all narrative plot. The elliptical repetition also builds suspense that seems to accumulate towards the end. The dramatic scenes appear eternally; the urban nightly journey could take place anywhere, anytime. Song Tao presents a slice of reality as kinetic views of urban space and fragments of memory. His vision is one of documenting and creating a...

Chen Wei, born in 1980 in Zhejiang Province, currently lives and works in Beijing. His artistic practice started in Hangzhou, where he initially engaged in the performance of experimental music and sound art before transitioning to the creation of photography, video and installation. As a mid-career artist active on the international art scene today, Chen Wei's works are widely recognized for their conceptual shooting, meticulous stage setting, and theatrical construction. Through this unique dimension that lies between reality and fiction, world and dream, Chen presents the complex realities and psychological states of contemporary society. In recent years, he has increasingly extended his practice to the exhibition site, continuously employing various media such as video, sound, and inst...

Since the 1980’s, in an attempt to find a new method of socialization after the marginalization of intellectuals and the resolution of mainstream politics, contemporary Chinese Art has used symbols of popular politics and business trends to create a new favored aesthetic. Gu Zhenhua portrays the internal utopian thoughts of an individual living within a consumerist and technological society. Everything from the beach day animals to the surreal and vibrant colored background all printed on cotton, depicts this idealistic mode of thought. Although Jenks, an American scholar, once said "We already live in a complex world", due to this new era, most of our dreams and fantasies today are comparatively simple. Knowing this, how doe we make art more accessible to the people of a busy and technolo...

Shen Fan started disassembling concrete forms and space in painting in the 70s and 80s, and began creating abstract painting works. Since 1998, he has been bringing Chinese painting elements into multi mediums and materials such as ceramics, neon light, metal, and music, expanding the boundaries between painting and new media. He is one of the earlier Chinese artists who combine classical aesthetics into the contemporary context to explore contemporary Chinese cultural expressions.Shen Fan’s works are composed of different series with distinct features, and changing materials. But they maintain the temperament of the classical Chinese literati arts. His installation works of 2006 go back to Huang Binhong period and re-analyse the use of space and brush strokes of classical Chinese landscap...

Liu Weijian (b.1981) lives and works in Shanghai. He graduated from Shanghai Normal University of Art (2005). Liu Weijian has defined his cold and recondite way of “social narration” through his early works: he wears a cold neutral “image” mask and takes it as the root of his “conceptual painting”. With his cold touch and melancholy feelings, Liu Weijian's work deals with many of the current issues he and his contemporaries think about daily and creates a feeling of constant movement and of unfinished business.After that, the ever-changeful themes and painting styles are the self-evolution with the increase of ages, expansion of horizons, and the changes of social experiences of Liu Weijian. “Every once a while I will go to some places, somewhere nothing special, no particular choice, just...

Liu Cong, born in 1987 in Shandong Province, graduated from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Oil Painting Department in 2010, now lives and works in Beijing. Liu Cong continues his long-standing exploration of “painting” as a mode of expression. After removing different means of expression such as pictorial depiction, narrative, and knowledge production, Liu chooses to use a variety of ready-mades as “models.” While emphasizing the presence of the body, through the artificial “image-making” of these “objects” on canvas, along with detached reflection, he releases pictures with spiritual properties and gives them a perceptual tension.Recent exhibitions include: Liu Cong: The Long Now, ShanghART Beijing (2023); Semi-automatic Mode 3: Liu Cong & Xiao Wucong, ShanghART, Beijing (2022); ...

Zhou Tiehai was born in 1966 in Shanghai, where he also lives and works today.Zhou Tiehai's conceptual projects represent the artist's vengeful attitude towards the self-absorbed art market. His work's power to amaze and provoke is the result of a host of strategies that mix antagonism with sincerity. The key ingredients that drive Zhou Tiehai's unsettling yet amusing practice include appropriating classical imagery, generating ironic projections, proclaiming laconic yet heartfelt discourse, and actively subverting painterly craft. He takes on the role of both artist and patron as many of his airbrush paintings are rendered by assistants under his supervision. He permits himself to 'play' with art's historical baggage by making paintings that are simultaneously self-aware and self-abnegati...

Lin Yuqi's video and installation works question about the truth of the real world, including the truth about self, and the identity of women in traditional social concepts. The artist uses images to write proses or poems, with symbolism technique frequently used amongst. Her creative language is pure and powerful. The works boldly express the desire, restlessness, loneliness, and weakness in human nature, which makes Lin's work so very touching.Lin Yuqi was born in Fuzhou, Fujian in 1994, graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2019 with a master's degree, and currently lives and works in Guangzhou.  Main exhibitions include: Lin Yuqi: Room Theatre, Boxes Art Space, Shenzhen (2021); Under the Sign of Saturn, ShanghART M50, Shanghai (2020); Aksuru doesn't know what to dr...

Hu Yang's extensive photographic publication "Shanghai Living" documents the living spaces of 500 families living in today's Shanghai. A selection of 100 of the images were first displayed at ShanghART Gallery and gained unforeseen public attention due to their rare and unique presentation of intimate and private spaces. The featured photographs take on an anthropological and sociological approach that attempts to mirror the dramatic changes in domestic living situations that occurred following the process of modernization and the Open Door policy in China. The photographs act as cultural documents as well as aesthetic objects that give us an almost voyeuristic view into a group of diverse private spheres ranging from the modest dwellings of migrant workers to the luxurious abodes of forei...

Tang Da Wu (b. 1943) currently lives and works in Singapore. Chinese-educated while growing up in Singapore post-World War II, Tang attained a Diploma in Youth and Community Works as the first graduating cohort of the National Youth Leadership Institute in 1968. While not professionally trained in art, Tang enjoyed drawing and actively practised painting while learning from more established painters. Following his first solo exhibition of drawings and paintings in 1970, Tang sought to further his artistic pursuits by studying abroad. He received a BFA in sculpture from the School of Fine Art, Birmingham Polytechnic (now Birmingham Institute of Art and Design) in 1974 and pursued advanced studies in sculpture at Saint Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins) from 1974-75. In 1985,...

Li Ran, 1986 Born in Hubei, lives and works in Shanghai. Graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Oil Painting Department with BFA. His work involves multiple media such as video, performance, painting, installation and writing, etc. In recent years,  he embarked on a journey surveying the antagonist roles in theatre, stage art, make-up design, the production of imported films and espionage films since 1950s in China. The artist often writes images through collections of photo documents, character scenes, and dubbed monologues. Meanwhile, he also expands the more complex and personalized time and space of this writing in painting, sound, and installation. Li Ran has exhibited at the Center Pompidou, Pairs; basis door actuele kunst (BAK), Utrecht; Huas der Kulturen der Welt (HK...

Mao Yan has emerged in recent years as one of the most dynamic Chinese painters. Although the genre of portraiture is not commonly encountered in Chinese art, it manifests with both Eastern and Western sensibilities in Mao Yan's work. His expressive style and controlled palette reflect a connection to the aesthetic and cultural climate of China as well as the influence of 20th-century American conceptual art. His canvasses are typically bi-chromatic in either black and white with deep shades of brown. With a mastered economy of marks, he delineates his compositions with broad, sweeping gestures and visible drips, resulting in images that at times dissolve into near-abstraction. His brilliant use of light and shadow, colours and texture makes him stand out. Each of his paintings convey comp...

Wang Youshen's art is characterized by a focus on the influence mass media exerts on our thoughts, emotions, and actions. For example, the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, which are determined by value judgments if never explicitly stated. In his photograph-based images, Wang Youshen uses selected press images alongside private photos as the basis of his investigation into the various functions and values of images as well as their truth content and modes of employment. Having worked as a magazine editor, Wang Youshen is particularly concerned about the power of print imagery. This is directly reflected in his work Newspaper (1993), where he uses newspaper as raw material, both covering entire walls and printing them directly onto fabric for clothing. In a similar project called News...

ShanghART SUHE is the new project space of ShanghART gallery. It is located on the second floor of SUHE HAUS, overlooking the Suzhou River. The exquisite space combines the characteristics of a historical building with ShanghART's mission of fostering contemporary art. ShanghART SUHE is ShanghART's third exhibition space in Shanghai. It complements ShanghART’s storied M50 space and the newly opened ShanghART WB Central.ShanghART operates galleries in Shanghai (since 1996), Beijing (since 2008) and Singapore (since 2012).

Sun Xun was born in 1980 in Fuxin in Liaoning province, China. He graduated in 2005 from the Print-making Department of the China Academy of Art. In 2006 he established π Animation Studio. He currently lives and works in Beijing. The works of Sun Xun are mainly drawing and/or animation. Sun Xun also exhibits his individual cell drawings and other mixed media works, oftentimes alongside his videos. Sun Xun’s personal visual language consists of metaphoric imagery, dark and intense hand drawing, and dreamy narrative. In recent years, Sun Xun uses New Media Art as a point of origin to explore more possibilities within the expansive realm of visual art: he explores narrative methods using diverse mediums such as newspaper, book, woodcut print, Chinese ink, pigment powder, probe into non-linear...

Lu Lei was born in Jiangsu in 1972. He graduated from the Sculpture Department of China Academy of Art in 1998, now works and lives in Beijing.As one of the important artists in contemporary Chinese installation art, Lu Lei's works show sensitivity and precise control of material texture. His works often exude classical mysticism and allegorical inner qualities. Lu Lei is good at creating images of vivid imagination. In his works, social symbols, personal memories and sensitive intuitions of material attributes are combined to form a closed system with hidden orders.Recent exhibitions include: First Spring - Chapter 4, Lu Lei & Apichatpong Weerasethakul, ShanghART, Beijing (2021); Meditations in an Emergency, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2020); Lu Lei: Wander Giant, ShanghART...

Using pencil as her main medium, Hu Liu often takes several months to complete a single drawing. In her works, multiple layers of pencil markings densely weave together an opaque, almost abyssal “surface” where substance and space, light and darkness enter into a zone of indistinction. As a result, the viewer cannot perceive the entirety of her drawing from a fixed position, but has to get up close, move away, and then walk about the work in order to access what lies at the limit of its visibility. This immersive and memorial mode of seeing transports the viewer to an arcane dimension of experience in which the physiognomy of ten thousand things becomes disclosable in a flash. Furthermore, due to the dispersion of light by the graphite, it is nearly impossible to reproduce Hu’s drawings th...

Arin Rungjang (born 1975, Bangkok; lives and works in Bangkok) is known for deftly revisiting historical material, overlapping major and minor narratives across multiple times, places, and languages. His interest lies in lesser-known aspects of Thai history and their intersection with the present in the sites and contexts of his practice. Objects, which can draw together distant events across time and space, are central to his investigations. He has a practice that spans different media and often involves video and site-specific installation. In his exploration of history and everyday life experiences he artfully dissects material and revisits master-narratives through the agency of small events.Recent exhibitions include ERRATA, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, Thailand (2021);...

Xue Song's art finds expression in the negative space usually left behind: soot and ash are crucial elements in his art, and the outlines of many of the figures in his images look as if they have been burned out. For Xue, ash is a reminder of fate and a symbol of rebirth. Fire plays a central role in Xue Song's work. It is a form of mourning. Time and again the artist elaborates on the fire that burned down his studio in the early 1990's, destroying all of his work to date, mainly oil paintings and calligraphy. The charred leftovers of pictures rescued from the ashes are used as fragments in the new works, as a kind of memorabilia of past events. The collages become a tactile site of remembrance and reflection with traces of the fire unavoidably present. Xue produces scenes that pick up on...

Hu Jieming is one of the pioneers of digital media and video installation art in today's China. He shows his partiality to interdiscipline which leads into a blending of remote fields. Hu’s works pay attention to internal physiology by transferring physical diagrams, gestures, architectural areas, identifications and staves etc. into a synthesized visual experience. Hu Jieming raises views and questions about time, space, history and memory, while his art covers a range of medium working with photography, video and digital interactive technology. He places the audience in the past and an uncertain situation, reminding them of personal memories to shape up individual texts. The objects, materials, videos, interactive programs and intelligentized controlling system in Hu’s works have embodie...

Wei Guangqing was born in Huanshi, Hubei province in 1963. He graduated from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Department of the oil painting of in 1985. He resides and works in Wuhan. Selected exhibitions include: China Expression, Ke Art Museum, Shanghai (2019); Metamorphosis: Huang Zhuan Memorial Invitational Exhibition, OCAT Shenzhen, Shenzhen (2017); Wei Guqngqing: Plus or Minus Zero, Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan (2015); Re-History, Chinese Contemporary Art Invitation Exhibition, Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan (2012); Old Scriptures, Wei Guangqing Solo Exhibition, ShanghART H-Space, Shanghai (2008); Zuo Tu You Shi, Wei Guangqing's Art Exhibition, He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen (2007); 85 New Wave - The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2007); Ma...

Xu ZhenArtist, Curator, MadeIn Company Founder.Xu Zhen, born in 1977, lives and works in Shanghai.In 2004, Xu Zhen won the prize for ‘Best Artist’ at the China Contemporary Art Award. His practice covers various media such as installations, video, painting, performance, etc. Xu Zhen has exhibited internationally, at museums and biennales, such as, the Venice Biennale (2001, 2005), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2004), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, 2005), MoMA PS1 (New York, 2006), Tate Liverpool (2007), Hayward Gallery (London, 2012), Lyon Biennial (2013), Armory Show (New York, 2014), Long Museum (Shanghai 2015), Al Riwaq Art Center (Qatar, 2016), Sydney Biennial (2016), Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2017), Sharjah Biennial (2019), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, 2019), National Ga...

Born in Zhangye in 1980, works and lives in Shanghai. His practice often consists in large scale projects including installations, sculptures, videos, paintings, frequently animated with live performances. These works presented as a whole, with a strong performative, musical, dramatical nature, explore notions related to human perceptions, collective consciousness, conflict of wills, power as well as psychological and physical manipulations. Zhang Ding's exhibitions and projects reflect on alienations taking place in a social and political context, and stage scenes with confrontational and chaotic natures. Selected solo exhibitions include: “Observation Points ”, ShanghART M50, Shanghai, 2024; “Zhang Ding & Teppei Kaneuji: Two Clubs, How Art Museum, 2023”; “Zhang Ding: CON TROL CLUB”, Fosu...

As a pioneer of the practice of video art in China, Zhu Jia always tries to capture ordinary scenes through distinctive methods of practice. He tends to record the most mundane people and phenomena, but also actively presents a world outside the viewing habits. In his 1994 piece Forever, which has participated in several international exhibitions, Zhu attached a camera to the left wheel of a bicycle. The artist rode this bicycle over 10km around the city of Beijing, and unlike ordinary videos, he captured the ever-changing world with an unfamiliar perspective in a dizzying state. In the work Did They Have Sexual Relation? (1995) he held up a sign, posing this very question in front of busy people and even strangers. By establishing these fictitious relationships, the overall artist discuss...

Liang Yue was born in Shanghai in 1979. She graduated from the Shanghai Art Academy in 2001. Now she lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Recent exhibitions include: Wang Xingwei in Shanghai 2002-2008, Power Station of Art Museum, Shanghai (2022); City on the Edge: Art and Shanghai at the Turn of the Millennium, UCCA Edge, Shanghai (2021); The Circular Impact: Video Art 21, OCAT, Shanghai (2021); Another Time, Another Place, New works screening, OCAT Shanghai x PHOTOFAIRS, OCAT Shanghai, Shanghai (2020); Dis-/Continuing Traditions: Contemporary Video Art from China, Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, Tasmania, Australia (2020); New Art History, 2000-2018 Chinese Contemporary Art, MoCA Yinchuan, Yinchuan (2019); Chinese Contemporary Selected Videos, Cinema Dynamo, Centre D'Art Contemporain...