AI JING
Painting, sculpture, installation
A native of Shenyang, Liaoning Province, Ai jing is a Chinese contemporary artist whose fame started as a star singer-songwriter who has produced five albums of her own music, she is also an accomplished artist. In 1999, Ai Jing took up painting and learned from contemporary artist Zhang Xiaogang, and then she moved to New York to study contemporary art. In 2007 she began to take part in art exhibitions as a professional artist and held her first solo show ”ALL ABOUT LOVE” at the Today Art Museum in Beijing in 2008.
Ai Jing’s work is overwhelmingly positive, much of it delighting in color and most especially the series I Love Color, where the letters LOVE are repeated over and over across the canvas. The Chinese word for love (愛) is another homonym for Ai’s surname. Asked about the love motif, Ai says, “This is my mission. Love seems like an easy theme, but it’s the most difficult.”
BRIGITTE AUBIGNAC
Painting, Sculpture, Film
The subject of Brigitte Aubignac's work is essential to "paint the emotions". Exploring every day, the unusual, while making reference of a mirror game in a back and forth between past and present as in the FAUNES series or in the MAQUILLAGES series, where the faces of women are painted facing the mirror of appearances where malice and humor borders on cruelty making them close and intimate to us.
Brigitte Aubignac is also an artist for whom art has an important resonance with political news. She anchors her characters in our time: wildlife bubbles in schoolyards or walks with gangs of teenagers on the outskirts of our cities. Wildlife is these different beings that find it difficult to find their place in the world; but they are also mythological characters and like any legend or myth, their role is to ask questions, "to explain why we are at this point". Brigitte Aubignac thus manages as much, and simply, to transport her audience into the intimate world of men and women, with gentleness, humour or disillusionment, as to question our own humanity.
CUI TAO
Painting
Born in Zibo, Shandong Province in 1975, contemporary artist Cui Tao is known in China for his portraits of families during the Cultural Revolution, painting replicas of Frida Kahlo's photograph. His recent works have been lucid depictions of plants' vitality and abstract realizations. He works and lives in Beijing and Dali.
ELISABETH CIBOT
Sculpture, Graphic Art, Architecture
Born in 1960 into a family of artists collecting Italian Renaissance bronzes, the sculpture has always been part of Élisabeth Cibot’s environment. She finds her happy during her studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in the workshops of Etienne Martin, Léopold Kretz, and César. Graduated in 1983 (burin section), she was also assistant to the painter Riccardo Licata at the Centro Internazionale di Grafica in Venice between 1981 and 1983, then «guest artist» at the Glass School of Harvey Littleton in Spruce Pine (U.S.A) in 1983. Back in Paris, she obtained a studio in the city in 1984. In parallel, she studied art history and validated the first thesis in 1984 in Roman Archaeology, then a DEA in 1990 in History of Techniques. The year 1993 marks a return to bronze statuary and large formats.
Since 1997, she has been working in Nogent-sur-Marne in a workshop of the Fondation Nationale pour les Arts Graphiques et Plastiques. Her works can be found in numerous private and public collections and are presented in various international galleries.
IVAN MESSAC
Painting, Sculpture
One of the singularities of Ivan Messac is that he did not wait until he was offered pictures to expose himself. In 1969, he staged a fresco on paper in the halls of the Nanterre University that marked his artistic and political commitment.No wonder that same year 69, he participates in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture. Two years later he exhibited three of the tables in the series "Absolute Minority" (often called the Indians) noted by the critic Jean-Louis Pradel who designates him as the youngest of the Figuration narrative while José Pierre devotes an article to him in his dictionary of Pop art. All of his work in the 1970s bears witness to this commitment. Whether he designs the sets of ballet for the BTC, participates in meetings of artists in Portugal during the revolution of carnations, gives his support to the union Solidarity, it is both as an artist and as a defender of human rights that he acts. Even today, while developing a plastic work presented by prestigious galleries, supported by the press, and recognized by institutions, he is interested in the poorest Street Immo and supports the Secours Populaire.
Admittedly, he was known and recognized as a sculptor but it is the painting he had embraced in his youth that seems to be the object of his concerns for more than fifteen years.
JULIEN FRIEDLER
Painting, Sculpture, Installation
Born in Brussels in 1950, Julien Friedler is a writer and contemporary artist. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Brussels. After studying philosophy and ethnology, he studied psychoanalysis in Paris. He then adheres to the post-structuralist theories of Jacques Lacan, while beginning personal psychoanalysis with him.
During the 1990s, he created "La Moire" in Brussels, an institute that promotes an interdisciplinary approach in the field of psychoanalysis. He wants to break the constraints of classical psychoanalysis.
Julien Friedler began as an artist in 1997. Self-taught but armed with a great experience on human character and a fascination for the unknown, he began to paint. The events of the second half of the 20th-century influence Sensitivity and understanding of the world. Through his art, he confronts contemporary post-modern society.
Today, he continues to create and write. He is the founding President of the Spirit of Boz association which works for the establishment of collective work and defends contemporary Art in all its forms.
HU ZI
Painting, drawing
Her modulated stroke, ranging from dry and bold signs to the fines hues, Hu Zi depicts Western musicians with the eyes of a contemporary Chinese, living in a chaotic and impulsively changing China. Hu Zi’s works also show the influence of some of the major Western painters: Andy Warhol, Egon Schiele (one of her favourites), David Hockney, Kokoschka, and Georg Grosz whose portraits often present the same use of colour, with watery and soft areas alternating with deep and rich strokes. These features make Hu Zi’s work extremely familiar to Western eyes. A question raises automatically when looking at her paintings: What is the spiritual driver behind her brushwork? Her work certainly does not result from observation, nor direct experience as it used to happen in the past for the most classical portraits: it does not even result from memory, from the recollection of past experiences; nor even from the will to relate Music and Painting and nor even from a comparison between different cultures. Maybe she was moved by the wish to express our modern life condition, made of an overwhelming mass of too fast information, almost impossible to freeze in the present: important fragments, like a face, a dress, a hairdo, a colour...small, individual reminders of a much bigger complexity.
MA LINGLI
Painting, Installation
Born in Chengdu in 1989, she graduated from the Department of Chinese Painting of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2012. She won the Gold Award for College Student Nomination of Today Art Museum. Ma Lingli commands the physical, perceptual, and psychological distances between her works of art and the viewers, allowing them to alternate repeatedly between states of encounter, proximity, and alienation. Meanwhile, the delicate materials she uses in her works such as silk, polyester, or projection curtains, act as threads that tie all her art together with their subtle presence.
MARTIAL RAYSSE
Painting, Sculpture, Drawing, Film
Born in 1936 in Golfe-Juan (France), Martial Raysse is a visionary artist, with a fascinating and singular trajectory. From his first creations of the 1960s, icons of the pop years, to those of today, of the pop period at the beginning of the 1970s, during which he resolutely places himself in break and retreat from the world of art and the dominant currents, until the ambitious pictorial production initiated in the 1980s and 1990s, with spectacular paintings proposing allegorical visions of humanity, Martial Raysse has multiplied innovations, notably by the unprecedented use of neon lights and film.
SHANG LIANG
Painting, sculpture, drawing
Shang Liang’s paintings are sometimes extracted from cinematic scenes, producing echoes and reverberations outside of the flat space of the picture plane. Sometimes based on specific characters, beginning with the “The Real Boy” series in 2012, her works are unlike traditional portraits. The muscle-mutated Superman constitutes an interesting and unique visual symbol in her works. In this exhibition, the artist presents the series of "Good Hunter" and "Sofa Man", as well as the newly expanded image of "Boxing Man": a figurative human body is gradually transformed and refined into an abstract. As a visual symbol, the strong muscles repeatedly depicted by Shang Liang have been separated from the parent body and become an independent new species. It is not only a heroic symbol of physical fitness, battle and conquest, but also an ambiguous metaphor of power, loneliness and contradiction.
These evolutionary and mutated "boxers", show the artist's contradictory male imagination, build from her cultural background, from the individual perspective of the artist.
SHI JIANMIN
Painting, Sculpture, Design
Shi Jianmin is one of the most respected artists in China. His work includes fine art, design, architecture, and landscape design. He was born in Xi’an in 1962, graduated from the Xi’an Art School in 1982, and completed his studies at the Central Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University in 1986. Shi Jianmin creates his works through the fusion of form, sentiment, and poetry. In his designs, the artistic concept is dominant and the functionality of the object is often subdued by the sculptural form.
YANG KAI
Painting, Installation
Yang Kai was born in 1987 in Yantai, China. Upon completing his studies at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he enrolled at the University for the Creative Arts (formerly Kent Institute of Art & Design) to further his academic training in fine art.
Yang Kai is well known for blending traditional motifs and aesthetics with contemporary subject matter and materials including black steel, acrylic, and the internet.
YANG XUN
Painting
Born in1981, Chongqing. He graduated from the oil painting department at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Art in Chongqing.
The relationship between Yang Xun's artistic expression and tradition is very complicated but restrained by reason. In his paintings, there are gardens, opera figures, rocks, water, flowers, and so on. His work seems to be trying to revive some kind of tradition, especially in aesthetics. He is known as the representative of the younger generation of "New Oriental Aesthetics".
ZHANG JUNLING
Painting
I just want to express dance in a new way, and I have tried many ways. The first time was on March 15, 2014. I was drawing when I was recruiting dancers that day. I tried some realistic ones, but it was not fun, but I drew a semi-abstract, deconstructed, and abstract one. Later, unintentionally, I held a pen in one hand and stared at the dancer without looking at the drawing paper, so I followed him.
WANG XIN
Painting
In August 2020, my father passed away. I stared into his serene face in silence. No fear, only softness, his face was dappled with sunlight streaming through the door and the refraction of light from the glass window, fragmented and merged with the faint lines and marks on his face. I saw an experience like seeing the rocks in Guilin, the kind of free flow between the organic and the inorganic. The skull will break down and decompose. Calcium and phosphorus will be absorbed by plants. New orders and compounds will be created from chaos and disarray. This is where I began to associate the skull and flesh with the metamorphoses between organic and inorganic matters. It is a “jungle” where humanity, post-humanity, and transcendental feelings converge. I'm fascinated by anthroposophy [founded by Rudolf Steiner]. In his theory, human bodies, plants, and stars are all physical manifestations of a complex and exalted world of spiritual beings, in other words, you can glimpse into the essence of the universe from every natural being. Changes and circulations are such generous and unbridled forces in nature that the distinction between life and death seems trivial.