Friday, October 3, 2008

Yue Minjun

Yue Minjun is a contemporary Chinese artist based in Beijing, China. He is best known for oil paintings depicting himself in various settings, frozen in laughter. He has also reproduced this signature image in sculpture, watercolor and prints. While Yue is often classified as part of the Chinese "Cynical Realist" movement in art developed in China since 1989, Yue himself rejects this label, while at the same time "doesn't concern himself about what people call him."

Yue's father worked in the oil fields of northeast China, and he himself worked in China's oil industry, before beginning studies in art in 1983. In 1989, he was inspired by a painting by Geng Jianyi in the "China / Avant Garde" show in Beijing, which depicted Geng's own laughing face. Disillusioned with politics by the Tiananmen Square uprising of the same year, he moved to an artist's colony outside Beijing in 1990. His signature style developed out of portraits of his bohemian friends from the artists village, and soon became a popular investment for foreigners looking to capitalize on China's opening to the west.

He has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including the 5th Shanghai Biennale, ''Mahjon'' at Kunstmuseum Bern and ''Xianfeng!'' at Museum Beelden aan Zee in the Netherlands. He is represented by Art Beatus in Vancouver and Chinese Contemporary in Beijing and London. His piece became the most expensive work ever by a Chinese contemporary artist, when sold in 2007 for 2.9 million pounds at London's Sotheby's. Until it's sale at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2007, this painting had been owned by Trevor Simon, a junior investment banker who bought it with about a third of his salary while working in the region. Simon kept this painting in storage for 10 years as required by the conditions of sale. . The record sale took place week after his painting 'Massacre of Chios' sold at the Hong Kong Sotheby's for nearly $4.1 million. 'Massacre of Chios' shares its name with a , by Eugène Delacroix, depicting the 1822 event in Greek history.

Yue Minjun’s first museum show in the United States took place at the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York. The show, ''Yue Minjun and the Symbolic Smile'' featured bronze and polychrome sculptures, paintings and drawings and ran from October 2007 to January 2008.

Youxin Yang

Youxin Yang , M.D., Ph.D. is an award-winning scientist, award-winning filmmaker, and award-winning painter.

Early career



Dr. Youxin Yang started her career in China and then advanced her education in France where she was awarded a prize from the Association for the Study of Pediatric Pathology in 1999 for her work on the WT1 Gene in Denys Drash Syndrome and Diffuse Mesangial Sclerosis.

Awards



"Feuille" , the first feature film by Dr. Youxin Yang won the top Remi Award at the 37th WorldFest - Houston International . This film tells a story of two female artists: a Meihua and a French photographer Feuille . Dr. Youxin Yang was the first Chinese female writer/director/leading actress to win the top Remi Award. Three years later, following 12 awards Feuille has won worldwide acclaim. Leaf , with new images and a new "True Love Has Only One End", written and composed by Dr. Yang herself, won another Remi Award at the 40th WorldFest - Houston on April 28th, 2007.

She won the "Award of Excellence" in the 2005 Accolade Competition for writing the song "Silent Fire" for her second feature film "Silent Fire", which also won Best Score at the New York International Festival .

She was a Award winner at the New York International , 2005.

Bibliography



Espace Richelieu . Youxin Yang, M.D. Ph.D. An Artist and Scientist. ISBN 978-0975286609.

Yingmei Duan

Yingmei Duan is a , performance artist, and . She lives in Braunschweig, Germany.

Short Biography


After her study in Petroleum Exploration in China she began to work as a freelance artist for several years. From 1993 to 1995 she was artistically active in the in Beijing. "To add one meter to an anonymous mountain" is one of the most well-known performances in which she participated. Until 1998 she worked in China freelance.

She went to Germany in 1998. Until 2006 she studied performance at Marina Abramovic, Film at Birgit Hein "Kunst in Aktion" at Christoph Schlingensief at the Hochschule fuer Bildende Kuenste in Braunschweig and finished her Masters in 2006.

During her study in Germany she participated in several IPG exhibitions organized by Marina Abramovic . These influenced her development, as did the workshops "Cleaning The House". Likewise the participation in numerous national and international exhibition, projects, and workshops .

Solo exhibitions include the 26 performances of the exhibition in the OKS gallery. In her exhibition "Playing with 14 rooms" 2005 she connects performance and installation.

Solo exhibitions


2005-2006
*“Playing with 14 rooms” Galerie auf Zeit Braunschweig, Germany
*“Bedroom 07. 11. 2005 - 02. 08. 2006” Juliusstr. 17, 38118 Braunschweig, Germany

2003
*“26 days in OKS” OKS Galerie Braunschweig, Germany

1996
*“Bilder aus Peking” Galerie am Prater, Berlin, Germany

1995
*“Duan Yingmei - Peking” KunsthausErfurt, Germany

Yin Zhaohui

Yin Zhaohui is an artist based in Beijing.

Yin was born in Henan, China. Yin is a painter depicting ambiguous scenes of the human form.

Yin graduated from China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2004.

Selected Exhibitions



2007

''ACAF New York'', City's Pier 92

''Art Singapore 2007'', Singapore

''Art Beijing 2007'', Beijing

''Crazy Group Exhibition'', Aura Gallery, Shanghai

''Group Show'', Aura Gallery, Hong Kong

''Shcontemporary 07'', Shanghai Exhibition Center

''CIGE 2007'', Beijing

Yang Zhichao

Yang Zhichao, Born in 1963 in Gansu province , is a revolutionary and extreme living and working in Shanghai.

After graduating from the Northern Manchuria Art University, Northwest Normal University in 1986, he started as a painter but became embroiled in the and politics of the multiracial prefect of East Guangzhou in which he lives. He attempts to raise social issues through his performances and has achieved notoriety through extreme actions such as branding his ID number on his body, planting grass on his back, and surgically implanting objects in his leg and stomach. His work is concerned with the body, and how, in an age of science and technology, our bodies no longer belong to ourselves but to society and the state. He has exhibited both in China and abroad, including the famous "Fuck off" show at the Eastlink Gallery, Shanghai, the Guangdong Museum of Art Contemporary Art, Guangzhou, 2003, the Dadao Live Art Festival, Beijing, 2004 and a tour of eight major institutions in the UK organised by Beijing-based curator Shu Yang in 2006.

His teachings have spread as far as the Baltics, including the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool, Colchester Arts Centre, Arnolfini, Bristol, the Victoria and Albert Mseum, the Chinese Art Centre, Manchester and the Chapter gallery, Cardiff.

Xu Zhen

Xu Zhen is a Chinese artist.

Artistic activities


Xu Zhen has had four solo exhibitions:
* 2008 Just did It!, James Cohan Gallery
: Untitled-Xu Zhen , ShanghART Gallery,Shanghai
* 2007 Art Basel Miami Beach 07-Xu Zhen: ShanghART Supermarket, Art Fair Booth N14, Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami, U.S.A.
: Art 38 Basel, Art Unlimited-Xu Zhen 18 Days , Art Fair Switzerland
* 2006 Xu Zhen: 8848 - 1.86, ShanghART H-Space,Shanghai
: 8848 - 1.86-Xu Zhen Solo Exhibition, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
: An Animal - Xu Zhen's solo exhibition, 2577 Longhua Road, , Shanghai
* 2002 Careful, Don't Get Dirty, Galerie Waldburger,
: A Young Man-Xu Zhen Solo Exhibition, Bizart, Shanghai

Xu Bing

Xu Bing is a -born artist, resident in the United States since 1990.

Biography


Born in Chongqing in 1955, Xu grew up in Beijing. In 1975, near the end of the Cultural Revolution, he was relocated to the countryside for two years. In 1977, he enrolled at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, receiving an MFA in 1987. In 1990 he moved to the United States, where he lives today.

In 1990-91, Xu had his first exhibition in the United States at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Elvehjem Museum of Art including his installations '''' and ''Ghosts Pounding the Wall''. In ''Book from the Sky'', the artist invented 4000 characters and hand-carved them into wood blocks, then used them as movable type to print volumes and scrolls, which are displayed laid out on the floor and hung from the ceiling. The vast planes of text seem to convey ancient wisdom, but are in fact unintelligible. ''The Glassy Surface of a Lake'', a site-specific installation for the Elvehjem, was on view in 2004-05. In this work, a net of cast aluminum letters forming a passage from Henry David Thoreau's Walden stretches across the museum's atrium and pours down into an illegible pile of letters on the floor below.

Working in a wide range of media, Xu creates installations that question the idea of communicating meaning through language, demonstrating how both meanings and written words can be easily manipulated. He received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award in July 1999, presented to him for "originality, creativity, self-direction, and capacity to contribute importantly to society, particularly in printmaking and calligraphy."

In 2003 he exhibited at the then new Chinese Arts centre in Manchester, and in 2004 he won the inaugural "Artes Mundi" prize in Wales for ''Where does the dust collect itself?'', an installation using dust he collected in New York on the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Partial List of Works



* ''Lanman Shanhua Magazine''
* ''A Book from the Sky''
* ''Ghosts Pounding the Wall''
* ''A.B.C....''
* ''Post Testament''
* ''Brailliterate''
* ''Introduction to Square-Word Calligraphy''
* ''Oxford Dictionary: Bird Definition''
* ''Silkworm Book''
* ''Lost Letters''
* ''Landscript Postcards''
* ''Red Book ''
* ''Dictionary''
* ''Book from the Ground''