Image via Complex Original
How do you select 25 individuals from a nation of 1.3 billion people? Arbitrarily is the only real answer. Though by no means exhaustive, the following list represents a cross section of artists that currently live and work in China and make really cool art.
China is at once a uniquely contemporary and deeply traditional society. Chinese social and political life is based largely on events of the last forty years, since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 forced a hard reset. The institution of the one-child policy in 1979, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the exponential economic growth in the '90s, the country’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001, the recent period of rapid Westernization, and the rise to global power have shaped every aspect of Chinese life.
Meanwhile, centuries-old artistic traditions, such as ink-wash painting and ceramics, remain dear and deeply ingrained in the culture. Ranging in age from those in their 20s to those in their 50s, the artists that follow are all affected and influenced by the country’s recent events and ancient artifacts. From the ultra famous to the super fresh, they deal with the constantly shifting current of Chinese society, politics, and economy, while maintaining a connection to the country’s deep cultural roots.
From old to young, here are 25 Contemporary Chinese Artists You Need to Know.
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ROBBBB
25. ROBBBB
Medium: Painting
Based in: Beijing
Chinese street art is an odd beast, but artists like ROBBBB prove that odd can be really, really good. For all the tales of strictness and censorship in China, it may come as a surprise that graffiti is perfectly legal. It therefore doesn't come with connotations of danger and deviousness like it does in the West, and also means that artists can spend more time on pieces, so pictures rather than words dominate the streets. Despite these ideal conditions, a good street artist (or any of them) is hard to find in China—perhaps social acceptance makes it less fun for some. ROBBBB has taken advantage of the freedom, and developed a unique and refined style.
Website
Ta Men
24. Ta Men
Medium: Painting, Photography
Based in: Beijing
Lai Shengyu and Yang Xiaogang form the artist duo Ta Men, which means "they" in Mandarin. They, "They", stage outrageous, surrealistic scenes in paint and photo collage that star an ever-changing cast of characters. Though the scenes always take place on the same fictional "stage"—the corner of a cafeteria-like room in an urban high-rise—the location of the room shifts constantly as the window opens onto new horizons in every image. These collaborative paintings have more than just the two personalities that make them—they may be classifiable as fully schizophrenic.
Birdhead
23. Birdhead
Medium: Photography
Based in: Shanghai
Birdhead is the collective name of Ji Weiyu and Song Tao, photographers who document life in their hometown of Shanghai in every aspect and at every second. Copious snapshots of landscapes, architecture, people, animals, trash, puddles, and anything in between make up their massive and growing archive. Their style is quick and dirty, a method and aesthetic that speaks to the pace of urban life and the temporary status of the present in their rapidly changing city.
Hua Tunan
Hua Tunan
Medium: Painting, Illustration
Based in: Foshan
At just 22 years old, Chen Yingie AKA Hua Tunan already possesses masterful skill and sage understanding of artistic tradition. He draws on classical styles and methods using modern media like spray paint and his signature "ink splatter" and paper cuts. His striking compositions often feature natural subjects, particularly animals, and with nimble technique and a bold sense of color.
Website
Yuan Xiaopeng
Yuan Xiaopeng
Medium: Photography
Based in: Shanghai
Yuan Xiaopeng captures strange and hilarious moments between and around the people of Shanghai. He's not a bad illustrator, either.
Huang Yulong
Huang Yulong
Medium: Sculpture
Based in: Jingdezhen
Huang Yulong's ceramic renditions of Buddhas in hoodies and Maos in track suits fit symbols of Chinese culture with the trappings of Western hip-hop subcultures. They take advantage of and play on sometimes surprising convergences between the two, like the gleaming gold and silver surfaces that shine like Rick Ross' chains and a Buddhist idol, one and the same.
Zhang Peng
Zhang Peng
Medium: Photography
Based in: Beijing
Zhang Peng uses digital manipulation and distortion to keep you awake at night—or, more specifically, to create engrossing yet extremely bizarre and deeply disturbing images of little girls. Every ounce of innocence and hope is drained from the girls' artificially-widened eyes, instead they are desperate and sad in mature clothing and sinister situations. The rich colors, velvety textures, and careful, theatrical compositions create strong visual draw to otherwise horrific scenes.
Website
Joey Leung Ka-Yin
Joey Leung Ka-Yin
Medium: Illustration
Based in: Hong Kong
Graphic artist Joey Leung Ka-Yin uses a style that is somewhere between ink painting and cartooning to create charming, fantastical worlds. The soft colors and feminine characters are only sometimes as sweet as they first appear—malaise, anxiety, and cynicism are expressed in facial cues, scenery details, and texts that often accompany her pictures. A translation of the text on Under the Skin, above, reads, "Taking off my skin/ I can see my true self/ How can I compare with you?/ Honestly, we are actually the same without the skin/ Why we bother to compare?"
Liu Ding
Liu Ding
Medium: Installation
Based in: Beijing
Through both conceptual and curatorial projects, Liu Ding explores the ways that value—economic and otherwise—is created in the art world. In the Sample series, he hired factory workers to paint the same picture over and over again in an assembly line fashion. The result, seen installed above, is very clever and a little bit cheeky, as is his ongoing Store project. The Store, which lives online but has also appeared in exhibition contexts, is an active imitation of art commerce, selling objects like unfinished paintings and rubber balls.
Chen Qiulin
Chen Qiulin
Medium: Multimedia
Based in: Chengdu
In any medium you like, Chen Qiulin makes beautiful and poignant work addressing the process and results of urbanization outside of an urban context. Much of her work highlights its violent and barreling effects on rural areas in her native Sichuan province, though she also makes gestures to generate hope and return stability to disrupted communities. For Tofu—100 Chinese Surnames, she carved the most common Chinese last names from tofu, one of the country's most common food staples, and displayed them along a Sichuan road.
Liu Bolin
Liu Bolin
Medium: Photography
Based in: Beijing
Waldo has nothing on Liu Bolin, a true master of disguise how takes incredible photos of himself camouflaged in unlikely places all over the world. This isn't the kind of camo the army issues— he can disappear into famous monuments, grocery stores, even against open water. Unbelievably, he manages this feat without any digital retouching or manipulation. Instead, he and his team hand-paint his clothes and skin to match every detail of the scenery, and find just the right camera angles that allow him to blend seamlessly into any background.
Liu Wei
Liu Wei
Medium: Multimedia
Based in: Beijing
If prestigious foundations and international art collectors funded the fantasy projects of your 11-year old imagination, it might turn out like the work of Liu Wei. Indigestion, for example, is a giant sculpture of a poop, in which can be found "undigested" bits like toy soldiers and airplanes. It Looks Like a Landscape, above, mimics the look of traditional Chinese landscape painting using photos of butts in the air. Of course he makes more grown-up work as well, like Library II, a miniature city carved out of books. Across varied media and styles, Liu's work is characterized by outlandish, visceral, and/or satirical elements.
Jiang Zhi
Jiang Zhi
Medium: Photography, Video
Based in: Shenzhen/Beijing
Jiang Zhi works in painting, video, installation, and photography. He inserts the impressively beautiful and totally impossible into scenes of everyday occurrence.
Website
Yang Fudong
Yang Fudong
Medium: Film
Based in: Shanghai
Film and video artists in China must contend with the reigning king of the medium, Yang Fudong. He is known for his slow and measured style of filmmaking and creating a sense of elegance and timelessness through styling and cinematography. He shoots on 35mm black-and-white film to help achieve these effects. Shown in multi-channel installations, linear narrative is eschewed in favor of meticulously-composed tableaux that illustrate individual experience and personal identity in modern life. His aesthetic of idyllic urban sophistication is good for business too: he directed a campaign for Prada menswear in 2010.
Website
Chen Xiaoyun
Chen Xiaoyun
Medium: Video, Photography
Based in: Hangzhou
Chen Xiaoyun makes unforgettable images. A man vomiting on potted flowers, a man in a Santa Claus suit being beaten on a street corner, someone swallowing a bundle of sticks, a man lashing a fleet of dump trucks with a bullwhip—each scenario treats a particular symbol or symbolic gesture in a way that teeters on the edge of absurdity, futility, and obsolescence.
He Sen
He Sen
Medium: Painting
Based in: Beijing
Ingeniously, He Sen has made a career painting beautiful, scantily-clad young women with a stuffed animal in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Admittedly, the stuffed animal is sometimes replaced by a bottle of liquor or a piece of jewelry, but the sensual central figure surrounded by wisps of smoke remains the cornerstone of his oeuvre. Something about his muted color palette and his high-intensity photorealism subdue what could otherwise be overt sexuality—instead they seem stony, aloof, and highly aware. Understanding that it is possible to have too much of a good thing, he has turned to landscapes in his more recent work, reimagining traditional ink styles in oil paint.
Yu Hong
Yu Hong
Medium: Painting
Based in: Beijing
Scenes from her own daily life, her own childhood, her own family, and her own friends are Yu Hong's main subject matter—but fear not, her work is no labor of narcissism or saccharine personal nostalgia. Rather, individual figures and vignettes from her experiences and memories are collaged together in paint, reconstituting them as representations of a shared experience of contemporary life.
Zeng Fanzhi
Zeng Fanzhi
Medium: Painting
Based in: Beijing
Zeng Fanzhi is one of the most successful artists in China today. He gained recognition in the '90s with his Mask Series, in which somewhat cartoonish figures don disconcerting white masks. One of these works set a record for highest price brought at auction for the work of a living Chinese artist, fetching $9.7 million in 2008. Though German Expressionism has always had an influence on his work, he has also begun to refer to earlier moments in German art, like his citation of Albrecht Dürer in 2012's Hare.
Wang Jinsong
Wang Jinsong
Medium: Photography
Based in: Beijing
Wang Jinsong works in a variety of media, first known in the '90s as a painter of the Cynical Realist movement, and more recently turning to conceptual photography. He employs repetitive, serial imagery to address the effects of urban development and social policies, such as the one-child restriction. In both paint and photo, he has created hundreds of portraits of families posed in identical compositions, highlighting the homogenization of domestic life that the policy creates. Other series also focus on aspects of daily life, such as televised news broadcasts or city buildings marked for demolition.
Website
Liu Xiaodong
Liu Xiaodong
Medium: Painting
Based in: Beijing
In a scars-and-all realist style, Liu paints the faces and places effected by rapid modernization across China. Unlike many of his peers, who represent their own urban environments, Liu gravitates toward smaller, former-industrial towns to find his subjects. He often paints from life, resulting in pictures that are sometimes gritty or uncomfortable, but also earnest and direct.
Website
Liu Jianhua
Liu Jianhua
Medium: Sculpture, Installation
Based in: Shanghai
The time-honored medium of Chinese porcelain breaks from tradition, sometimes literally, at the hands of ceramicist Liu Jianhua. Liu foregoes decorative plates and vases in favor of objects like televisions, tires, or pocket-sized sculptures of headless, armless women. His strange figures recline in provocative poses, their tight dresses just barely covering them, but their lack of arms or faces puts pause on their sex appeal and makes them strange and creepy instead—like the cast-off toys of a particularly boisterous child. He has also created large-scale installation works that touch on themes of excess, waste, and consumption.
Website
Yue Minjun
Yue Minjun
Medium: Painting, Sculpture, Installation
Based in: Beijing
Since the 1990s, Yue's laughing face has perhaps become the most recognizable emblem of contemporary Chinese art. The iconic character refers to traditional images of the Laughing Buddha and the heroic proletariats of Maoist propaganda, as well as a Western stereotype of the laughing Chinaman. Bright and outlandish, his paintings and sculptures feature clones of the same beaming figure in any number of geometric configurations, invented surrealist scenarios, or art historical allusions. It is nearly impossible not to laugh along with him.
Sui Jianguo
Sui Jianguo
Medium: Sculpture
Based in: Beijing
Sui Jianguo's conceptual sculpture uses objects and imagery from everyday life. His Made in China series uses those ubiquitous words and the figure of a toy dinosaur to explore his homeland's gargantuan presence in global commerce. He also deals with the present status of cultural symbols from the past through his disembodied Mao Suits or an ancient Greek Discobolus dressed in a modern business suit.
Zhou Chunya
Zhou Chunya
Medium: Painting, Sculpture
Based in: Chengdu
His pet German Shepherd, Heigen, starred in Zhou's paintings and sculptures, known as his Green Dog series, for over a decade. These strange and personal portraits blend the spare compositions of traditional Chinese ink-and-wash styles with the color, emotion, and oil paint of German Expressionism. The beloved dog died mysteriously in 1999, and was suspected to have been poisoned by a neighbor, though Zhou's fascination with the animal did not cease. He also, however, has explored landscapes, spiced up with figures engaged in sexual acts.
Xu Bing
Xu Bing
Medium: Installation
Based in: Beijing
Xu Bing has been a major player in Chinese art for over 30 years. He creates extremely complex, systematic projects that often become large-scale, attention-grabbing installations. In 1987, he developed a vocabulary of 4,000 symbols that appear like Chinese characters but have absolutely no meaning in any language. He carved each into a wooden block and hand-printed them into a series of nonsense volumes, known as Book from the Sky. He later tattooed a pig with his made-up characters and put it in a pen with another pig inked with nonsense words in the English alphabet; the piece became notorious when the two pigs started going at it in the exhibition. Xu has also invented and even taught classes in Square Word Calligraphy, a method of writing English words in a script that looks like Chinese characters. His recent work has focused on non-linguistic matters, as the aptly-named Phoenix above, which was created from the demolition debris and materials found on Chinese construction sites.