Ai Wei Wei
b. 1957
Ai Weiwei was born in 1957 in Beijing, China, where he lives and works. Ai is known for his social or performance-based interventions as well as object-based artworks. Citing Marcel Duchamp, he refers to himself as a 'readymade', merging his life and art in order to advocate both the freedoms and responsibilities of individuals. 'From a very young age I started to sense that an individual has to set an example in society', he has said. 'Your own acts and behaviour tell the world who you are and at the same time what kind of society you think it should be.' As material for his art, he draws upon the society and politics of contemporary China as well as cultural artefacts such as ancient Neolithic vases and traditional Chinese furniture, whose function and perceived value he challenges and subverts.
Gao Brothers
b. 1956
Gao Zhen was born in 1956 in Jinan, China and Gao Qiang was born in 1962 in Jinan, China. The Gao Brothers are a pair of artist brothers based in Beijing, they have been collaborating on painting, installation, performance, sculpture, photography and writing since the 1980s. Their work has been exhibited all over the world, and held in private collections and museums, such China National Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Princeton University Art Museum.
Huang Yan
b. 1966
Huang Yan was born in 1966 in Jilin Province, is an eminent Chinese painter, sculptor, photographer and performance artists based in Beijing. He graduated from the Changchun Normal Academy in 1987 and is currently a Lecturer at Changchun University. Like many of the recent internationally recognized artists from China, Huang Yan conflates aspects of China’s rich traditional art with contemporary global art practices. His photos of models painted in traditional Chinese landscape combine one of the great Chinese art forms with body art. He operates his own gallery, Must Be Contemporary Art, in Beijing's 798 Factory/Art Center. He exhibited in London, Italy, The Netherlands and New York City.
Kazuo Shiraga
1924 - 2008
Born in 1924, Shiraga specialized in Japanese-style painting at school, switching later to oil painting. By the time he joined the "Gutai" group, a Kansai-based avant-garde art group, in 1955, he had begun to paint directly with his hands and feet, abandoning the brush all together. For this work too, Shiraga suspended himself from ropes and painted this work with his feet, using the canvas as a brush. Shiraga has commented that, through this method of painting, he wanted to display "traces of action carried out with speed." Indeed, the flow and build-up of pigment in this work create a dynamic effect resembling the violent movements of a massive beast, and the surface of the painting preserves the raw movements of the artist challenging the canvas. Shiraga passed away in 2008.
Subodh Gupta
b. 1964
Subodh Gupta, born in 1964, is an artist based in New Delhi. He was born in Khagaul, Patna. He studied at the College of Art, Patna in 1983 - 1988, before moving to New Delhi where he currently lives and works. Trained as a painter, he went on to experiment with a variety of media. His work encompasses sculpture, installation, painting, photography, performance and video. Subodh Gupta is best known for incorporating everyday objects that are ubiquitous throughout India, such as the steel tiffin boxes used by millions to carry their lunch as well as thali pans, bicycles, and milk pails. From such ordinary items the artist produces sculptures that reflect on the economic transformation of his homeland and which relate to Gupta's own life and memories. As Gupta says: 'All these things were part of the way I grew up. They are used in the rituals and ceremonies that were part of my childhood. Indians either remember them from their youth, or they want to remember them.' Gupta transforms the icons of Indian everyday life into artworks that are readable globally. He is among a generation of young Indian artists whose commentary tells of a country on the move, fuelled by boiling economic growth and a more materialistic mindset. Gupta's strategy of appropriating everyday objects and turning them into artworks that dissolve their former meaning and function brings him close to artists like Duchamp; The Guardian called him 'the Damien Hirst of Delhi.' He succeeds in finding an art language that references India and at the same time can be appreciated for its aesthetic throughout world; as Gupta says: 'Art language is the same all over the world. Which allows me to be anywhere.' One of his recent major works, consisting of Indian cooking utensils, is 'Line of Control' (2008), a colossal mushroom cloud constructed entirely of pots and pans. The work was shown in the Tate Triennial at Tate Britain in 2009.
Wang Guangyi
b. 1957
Wang Guangyi was born in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province in 1957. In 1984 Wang Guangyi graduated from the oil painting department of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. The Chinese artist is known for being the leader of the New Art Movement circles that erupted out of China after 1989 and Political Pop Art, and for his Great Criticism series of paintings, using the images of propaganda from the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and juxtaposing those revolutionary images with contemporary consumer brand names from western advertising. Stylistically merging the government enforced aesthetic of agitprop with the kitsch sensibility of American pop, Guangyi’s work adopts the cold-war language of the 60s to ironically examine the contemporary polemics of globalization, implicating his role as an active participant in economic and social policy. Guangyi currently lives and works in Beijing, China.
Yang Shaobin
B. 1963
Born in 1963 Tangshan, Hebei Province, China and currently lives and works in Beijing. Yang Shaobin’s paintings are known for their refined composition, rich narrative and incisive commentary on the changing social landscape of China. The personal experience of growing up in a coal-mining town in rural China has informed his recent series of paintings and sculptures, entitled ‘X–Blind Spot’. Since 2004, he has been visiting the coalmining districts in Hebei Province, Shanxi Province and Inner Mongolia, and has documented the situation of coalmining communities. Coal, cheap and readily available, is the fuel of choice in China, and provides most of its energy. In observing the day-to-day experiences of China’s open-cut coalminers, Yang Shaobin examines the working conditions and social effects that are related to the production of coal in China, and considers the tensions between the individual and the collective in China’s changing economy. His solo exhibitions include: Long March Space, Beijing, China, 2008; and Alexander Ochs Gallery, Berlin, Germany, 2007. He also exhibited as part of a group on Liverpool and the 48th Biennale of Venice, Italy, 1999.
Zeng Chuanxing
b. 1974
Born in Sichuan Province in China in 1974, Zeng Chuanxing majored in oil painting at the Central University for Nationalities from 1995 to 1998. Having grown up among ethnic groups, Zeng is familiar with their life and has developed strong feelings towards them. Minority girls are a major theme of Zeng's paintings he is especially fond of classical realism; a means through which he believes can thoroughly and delicately express his feelings. Many Western museums and major public art galleries and collectors have been collecting Zeng Chuanxing.
Zhan Wang
B. 1962
Zhan Wang is a noted contemporary Chinese sculptor. Born in 1962 in Beijing, China, Wang entered the Central Academy of the Arts as a sculpture major in 1983. His style concentrates primarily on abstract forms, which he calls floating stones. These are large, highly textured rock-like pieces coated in chrome. They are also called mountain or scholar's rocks. Wang refers to the series, which he began creating in 1995, as Artificial Jiashanshi. Wang has applied a similar technique to meteorites. In 2004, Zhan scaled Mount Everest and placed one of his own sculptures at the summit. He created a large outdoor sculpture for The DeYoung Museum in San Francisco that was unveiled in 2005.
Zeng Fanzhi
B. 1964
Born in 1964 in Wuhan, China, Beijing-based artist Zeng Fanzhi has exhibited internationally in shows including the First Triennial of Chinese Arts at Guangzhou Art Museum, China, at the Bonn Kunstmuseum in Germany, and at Pekin at Pierre Cardin in Paris. He is noted for his Mask series of portraits depicting Chinese people of the 1990s.
Feng Zhengjie
B. 1961
Feng Zhengjie was born in 1961 in Sichuan Province, China. Reminiscent of Warhol’s screen printed celebrities, Feng’s paintings reflect a vision of futuristic pop. His generic portraits of women are influenced by promotional imagery: their exotic colours, electrified auras, and wind machine hair exude the glamour aesthetic of commodified desire. Feng appropriates these staples of western kitsch as a readymade lingo for a duplicity of ideology. His work is often discussed as capitalist critique, his empty eyed models posing as frivolous and vacant signifiers. Neither western nor Chinese in appearance, Feng’s femmes fatales are a super-hybrid of commercial beauty, a science fiction product of globalisation. Painted in massive scale, Feng’s canvases replicate the billboards from which they were inspired. Without text, or accompanying products, Feng’s paintings streamline their hard-sell ethos. Removing all distraction, he exposes the essence of temptation, magnifying the sex appeal of fantasy lifestyle and its gulf of intangibility. Transposing these disposable sentiments through his highly refined painting technique, Feng glorifies the allure of advertising as epic, enduring, and numbingly empty.
Gigi Scaria
b. 1973
Gigi Scaria was 1973 born in Kothanalloor, Kerala, India. He received a BFA in 1995 from The College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, and an MFA in 1998 from the Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi. He is the recipient of numerous residencies including: The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art Residency, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Great Britain (2008); The National Art Studio, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea (2007-08); among others. He exhibited in Berlin, Miami, Budapest, Seoul, Tokyo, Dubai, Bangkok and Zurich.
Jitish Kallat
b. 1974
Indian contemporary artist Jitish Kallat received his BFA in painting from the Sir J. J. School of Art in Mumbai in 1996. Kallat's work incorporates various media from painting, large-scale sculptural, photography and video often referencing both Asian and European artistic traditions alongside consumerism and advertising commentary. He unites these various mediums through enduring themes such as the relationship between the individual and the masses. He references both his own personal experiences and that of the masses, characterized by contrasting themes of pain, hope and survival. Kallat has been part of numerous museum exhibitions at venues including the Tate Modern, London; ZKM Museum, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and has contributed to important group exhibitions throughout the world.
Kim Dong-Yoo
B. 1965
Kim Dong-Yoo was born in 1965 in Seoul, Korea, where he lives and works. He divided a canvas as pixel unit and drew one image in each pixel unit. Those small pixel images also become bases to make one big image. For instance Kim draws Marilyn Monroe’s face in each small pixel unit to show one big image like Mao. When viewers watch Kim’s painting for the first time they can see one large portrait image such as BASMOCA’s Mao however, upon closer look they can recognize there are hundreds and thousands of small Marilyn Monroe images in the canvas. While cutting edge contemporary art, using various new media leads to the mainstream of the contemporary art world Kim’s elaborated oil paintings give us a fresh look.
Tianbing Li
b. 1974
Born in Guilin (China) in 1974 , he live and works in Paris, France and Beijing, China . He treads the line separating two dramatically different worlds: the China of his ancestral past and the China of the present. “I feel impelled to do this: all artists have a need to distance themselves from the world they live in to facilitate conditions conductive to reflection – otherwise they die”. The motivations underlying all of Li’s work are best characterized by an ongoing dialogue between old and new, between ancestral and modern, between the realities of China, on the one hand, and those of the European continent on the other.
Yan Pei-Ming
B. 1960
The Chinese painter, Yan Pei-Ming was born in 1960 in Shanghai. Since 1982 he has lived in Dijon, France, where he enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, graduating in 1999. Yan Pei-Ming has become known for his "epic-sized" portraits, including works featuring Mao Zedong, Bruce Lee and his father. He works with big brushes, and his paintings are brought to life by the rapid brush strokes which structure the picture space. He has exhibited his work in the Venice Biennale in 2003 and at the Sevilla Biennale in 2006. The Honolulu Academy of Arts and the National Gallery of Australia are among the public collections holding works by Yan Pei-Ming. In February 12, 2009, his painting “The Funeral of Mona Lisa” went on display at The Louvre in the room next to the original Mona Lisa.
Yue Minjun
b. 1962
Yue Minjun, born in Beijing in 1962, studied oil painting in the Hebei Normal University from 1985 to 1989 and is considered one of the most important artists of the Chinese avant-garde. He lives and works in Beijing and is part of the key movement of the post-1989 era in Chinese avant-garde art: Cynical Realism. Yue Minjun's works are instantly recognizable by the characteristic laughing figure, actually representing the artist himself, depicted in various guises in virtually all his works. Yue Minjun's trademark smile is many things at once. It is hilarious and infectious yet cynical and mocking. The roots of Yue Minjun's style can be traced back to the work of Geng Jianyi, which had first inspired Yue. Over the years, Yue Minjun's style has also rapidly developed. Yue often challenges social and cultural conventions by depicting objects and even political issues in a radical and abstract manner. He has also shifted his focus from the technical aspects to the "whole concept of creation". His self-portraits have been described by theorist Li Xianting as “a self-ironic response to the spiritual vacuum and folly of modern-day China.”
Zhang Xiaogang
b. 1958
Zhang Xiaogang was born in the city of Kunming in China's Yunnan province in 1958, he is a contemporary Chinese symbolist and surrealist painter. He came of age during the 1960s and 70s political upheavals known as the Cultural Revolution, which exerted a certain influence on his painting. In 1982, he graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in the city of Chongqing in Sichuan province, then joined a young group of young avant-garde painters who came to prominence during the 1980s. He has made a Bloodline series of paintings, which are often monochromatic, stylized portraits of Chinese people, usually with large, dark-pupiled eyes, posed in a stiff manner deliberately reminiscent of family portraits from the 1950s and 60s. Western painters including Richter, Picasso and Dali are influences. Zhang said: "I read in a book once a few words by British experimental artist Eduardo Paolozzi, which were very influential for me: 'a person can very easily have the right idea, but choose the wrong means to express it. Or he can have the right means, but lack a clear idea.'" Zhang also cites his discovery of photos of his mother as a young, attractive woman as a key inspiration for the Bloodline series.
Zhang Huan
B. 1965
Born 1965 in Anyang, Henan Province, China, Zhang Huan is a Chinese artist based in Shanghai and New York. He made his BA at the He Nan University in Kai Feng (1988) and his MA at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (1993). He is primarily a performance artist but also makes photographs and sculpture. Zhang involves the body in his sculptures as well. He makes giant copper hands and feet, magnified versions of fragments of broken Buddhist figures that he found in Tibet. By using quasi-religious ritual, he seeks to discover the point at which the spiritual can manifest via the corporeal. He uses simple repetitive gestures, usually regarded as meaningless work-for-work’s-sake chores. Buddhism, with its temple music, sculptures and philosophy are a prevalent theme in Zhang Huan’s work. His sculpture "Long Ear Ash Head", for example, consists of a massive head made of incense ash and steel. It fuses the artist’s image with the lengthened earlobes representing happiness and good fortune in the Buddhist religion. He has exhibited at shows including the 2002 Whitney Biennial and Rituals at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.
Zhou Tiehai
b. 1966
Zhou Tiehai is a contemporary Chinese painter whose art attempts to satirize much of modern Chinese art. Zhou does not paint his own works, though he earned an arts degree from the School of Fine Arts at Shanghai University in 1989. A typical process for him is to conceptualize a work, realize it on the computer, and then rely upon the help of assistants to physically create it.