ART021 2024

Cao Yu’s (b. 1988, Liaoning, China) works span a diverse range of media that include video, installation, performance, photography, sculpture and painting. She is famous for her incisive and bold artistic language, distinctive cross-disciplinary practice, witty and ironic expression. Nominated for the 2024–2025 Porsche ‘Young Chinese Artist of the Year’, Cao Yu will also showcase her themed artwork at the concurrent group exhibition of nominees of the fair.

Chen Sixin (b. 1995, Guangdong, China) focuses on posthumanism, combining the surrealist elements of old comics and cult films. His images depict visions of ecology (the environment), extraterrestrial life and the end times. Chen’s works focus on animals and aliens. Each work does not have a specific motivation, but random reactions and scattered ideas often enter the picture without being realized. There is a certain surrealistic fantasy of romanticism in his paintings. This autumn, Chen Sixin’s first solo exhibition titled Four-footed Animals Are Great with Galerie Urs Meile was held at the gallery’s Beijing branch.

As one of China’s foremost female contemporary painters, Ju Ting (b. 1983, Shandong, China) draws on her extensive knowledge of materials and techniques, gained through her printmaking background, to create a body of work characterized by coalescing two conventional art media: painting and sculpture, and obscuring the boundary between the two. Applying layer upon layer of acrylic paint over a wood panel, she builds them up to a certain thickness, at which point she determines differing means of manipulating the layers of colors. Despite the potentially cold and industrial feel of acrylic, Ju’s handling of the medium is deeply personal. Employing knife as brush, she fosters a poetic and tangible connection between the artwork and the body.

Xie Nanxing is captivated by the randomness of life, and his reflective nature allows him to navigate this randomness with agility and versatility. His recent paintings not only capture significant milestones in his life but also showcase his unique approach to the art of painting. The interplay of life’s elements with personal desire forms the driving force behind Xie Nanxing’s creation of his visual structures, where the concept of an ‘organism’ provides a thread of remarkable consistency to his enduring and impressive artistic endeavours. His paintings leave a wide open field for the viewer. The freedom offered by his paintings is often disconcerting and compels the viewer to linger. In November, Xie Nanxing’s latest solo exhibition will open at Galerie Urs Meile Beijing.

Xie Qi has persistently adhered to using ambiguous and dim tones to represent indistinct figures and objects. Her works penetrate the superficial veneer of youth, lust, and hormones to reveal the seemingly empty spirit of humanity and the surging, endless desires that lie beneath. Straddling the line between the concrete and the abstract, her artworks alternate between visibility and obscurity in an interplay of light and shadow. In her latest work Scarlet, the artist has borrowed the vibrant color of flowers and their seemingly complete and full contours, subtly hiding within them a gaze that is threatening and emotionally unstable.

Yang Mushi (b. 1989, Jiangxi, China) focuses on dealing with the relationship between material, form, time and reality. In his cutting and overlapping of social landscapes, the individual and the collective, consumption and production, freedom and restriction, the crisis in the development of globalisation, and the collision of multiculturalism are re-examined. Materialization: tomorrow is the artist’s first foray into text-based art. On the outside of the materialized three-dimensional word, more than twenty metal railings crisscross and intertwine, arranged in different hierarchical segments, creating tension within the confines. The work not only fuses the languages of Western conceptual art and Chinese socialist realist sculpture, but also incorporates intricate and dense manual labor and mechanical processing. During the fair, his large-scale new work titled Units is currently on display at the Jing’an International Sculpture Project (2024 JISP) in Shanghai.

The recent works of Zhang Xuerui (b. 1979, Shanxi, China) follow the thread of her unique abstract painting, providing a reflective summary of her recent works centered around the themes of ‘time’ and ‘object’. Employing painting and installation as her mediums, Zhang Xuerui engages in a dialogue that encompasses her personal experiences, family history, the passage of time, memory, and emotion. These recent works depict ghostly figures through subtle, hazy tones, presenting familiar forms that manifest the joy and pain imparts to us.

Tobias Kaspar (b. 1984, Basel, Switzerland) explores the intersection of art, consumerism, and fashion in his work. He has become known for his textile-related photography and sculptural works, which critically examine the growing fusion of the art and fashion industries. His latest solo exhibition, End of an Era, is on display at MadeIn Art Museum.