ABOUT ARTISTS : Amanda Heng,Arin Rungjang,David Diao,Ding Yi,Gao Lei,Han Mengyun,Hu Xiangcheng,Joyce Ho,Liang Shaoji,Mu Xue,Robert Zhao Renhui,Sun Xun,Tang Maohong,Wang Guangyi,Xu Zhen,Yang Fudong,Yu Youhan,Yiyao Tang,Yao Qingmei,Yin Yunya,Zhang Ding,Zhang Enli,Zeng Fanzhi,Zhou Li,Zhao Yang

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In the beginning of Zeng Fanzhi's artistic career in the late 80's, he 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. Appearance of Crosses 2001-8 was an early work by Ding Yi, which first featured in the Yokohama 2001: International Triennale of Contemporary Art. 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. He constructs the work with a unique method. He begins with a tartan check ground, then brushes colors over it repetitively in a regular overlapping pattern. Traditionally, the creation of a relationship between figure and ground is the chief principle of the creation of pictorial space. In this paradoxical approach, however, this relationship is prepared beforehand as an all-over grid on the canvas support, and the subsequent painting follows the same pattern. By abandoning all the rich possibilities of painting at the outset, Ding limits his task to repeating and confirming the pattern that is originally set as a given condition. Ding Yi's solo exhibition "Cosmotechnics: Ding Yi as a Planetary Code" at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, Italy, is still on view during Art Basel. Yu Youhan is one of the most important and influential artists in China. His 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. He began to systematically engage in abstract creation in the mid-1980s, with his most famous work being the "Circle (yuan) Series" launched in 1983. Because the circle is stable, it represents the beginning and the end of all things and symbolizes both a moment and an eternity. When paired with "one (yi)," the origin of the vast universe, it gives rise to philosophical imagery about the "moment" and the "eternal." The early "Circle Series" was a tribute to the spirit of the universe, following an understanding and belief in the laws of nature and life, with a strong influence from traditional culture. The works in this phase are primarily black and white, with subtle changes in tone. Liang Shaoji was born in Shanghai in 1945. From 1986 to 1989, Liang Shaoji studied soft sculpture from Maryn Varbanov at the China Academy of Art, who was one of the world's leading tapestry artists. 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 filled with a sense of meditation, philosophy and poetry while illustrating the inherent beauty of silk. "Xuan" means black, profound, deep, and mysterious. The artist directs silkworms to spin silk on the matte black metal slate, the traces of silk overlapping each other, to form "silk clouds", manifesting the process of the formed yet formless movements. Zhou Li was born in Hunan Province in 1969, and currently lives and works in Shenzhen. Graduated in 1991 from the Department of Oil Painting, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Lived and worked in France from 1995 to 2003. Guest Professor in the Department of Oil Painting, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, since 2012; Art Director of Boxes Art Museum, Shunde, since 2017; Director of No.5 Studio in the Department of Oil Painting of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and Academic Committee member of Pingshan Art Museum, since 2019. Art Director of the Boxes Art Museum, Dongguan, since 2025. In the series The World in a Flower, Zhou Li employs a collection of paintings to articulate the inspiration she derives from the life cycle of flowers. These paintings preserve her signature artistic language—an organic connection between abstract forms and mundane sensibilities. While the world typically admires the peak of a bloom, Zhou Li observes the camellia's decisive descent to the earth as it withers, reflecting on its inherent self-sufficiency and resilient vitality. To her, blooming and fading are simultaneous phenomena; within the interstices of the unfolding petals, she perceives nothing but light. Ultimately, her work captures and conveys the surge of life as it emerges from the threshold of decay. Amanda Heng's Singirl Revisits (2011), first presented in her solo exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum, situates the persona Singirl against sites across Singapore that were already disappearing at the time of the work's making. Conceived in deliberate contrast to the Singapore Girl—an image conceived by Singapore Airlines in the 1970s as part of its global branding—Singirl functions as a self-authored counter-image, grounded in lived experience rather than idealised projection. Amanda Heng wears the iconic batik uniform of a Singapore Airlines flight attendant and waves at the camera. The smile on her face feels slightly forced — like the polite smile you give when reluctantly posing for a family photo. Behind her are flea markets, nostalgic convenience stores, and practical local eateries furnished with plastic stools. Each photograph captures parts of Singapore that have already been demolished or are slowly disappearing. 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. Rainbow is an early work by Xu Zhen that demonstrates his overarching fascination with the fragility and resilience of the human body, and individuality, in relation to society. It shows a bare back being slapped repeatedly, reddening with each blow and eventually becoming entirely bruised and blotchy. Xu edits out the hands inflicting the slaps, thereby removing the act of violence and leaving only its visual and sonic trace. The static framing paired with dubbed sound suggests a long progression of time. Through this injured body, Xu crafts a meditation on the visibility and invisibility of violence. 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 a 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. Bruises is a painting series that Han began at the end of 2023, developed in direct response to escalating global unrest and violence. Rather than depicting human figures, she turned to animals and insects — bodies crushed, wings torn, shells fractured, forms pressed into the ground until they become stains, impressions, near-abstract remnants. The choice of non-human subjects is deliberate — a displacement of the viewer's habitual defenses, and a structural echo of the dehumanizing logic pervasive in violent rhetoric: when beings are classified as pests, threats, or collateral, their destruction becomes not only permissible but unremarkable. These paintings attempt to make that logic visceral — to give form to the mechanisms by which life is reduced, silenced, and rendered expendable. 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 painting is from his short film Shocking Dreams in the Circus, which tells an absurd dialogue between a letter from a different time and space and various animals in the circus. The works of Sun Xun are mainly drawing and/or animation, which probe into non-linear expressions of time and space, and inquire into both realistic and fantastical representations based on his own understanding of society and sociological theories. Joyce Ho, born in 1983 in Taipei, lives and works in Taipei. Joyce Ho received her M.A. in studio arts from the University of Iowa. In Ho's artwork, she fluidly shifts between painting, sculpture, installation, and performance as she explores daily rituals and basic human interactions. Joyce Ho's work examines the relationship between social behaviors (consumption, service, __, etc.) and the physical materiality of everyday objects. Through calculated precision, the layered trousers orchestrate a gradual transition from a 'seated' posture to a 'standing' form, thereby charting a dynamic visual trajectory. In doing so, the very act of accumulation performs the kinetic potential inherent to the garment. The resulting rhythmic layers capture the echoes of movement—much like a stop-motion film—freezing them into a singular, tangible dimension of time.