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''

Wu Shanzhuan

Wu Shanzhuan is an artist based in Hamburg.

Wu was born in Zhoushan. His art is in nature, often dealing with issues surrounding language. His work includes painting, drawing, , photography and .

He attended the Chinese Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou and Hochshule fur Bildende Kunste in Hamburg.

Selected Exhibitions

2003

''A Strange Heaven: Contemporary Chinese Photography'', Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic

2002

''Made By Chinese'', Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris

''Chicago Art Fair'', Chicago

2001

''Today No Water'', Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York

2000

''Conceptualist Art: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s'', Walker Art Center

1999

''Thing’s Right'', Cuxhavener Kunstverein, Germany

1998

''Inside Out – New Chinese Art'', New York, P.S 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York

''Vege-Pleasure'', Ingolfsstraeti 8 Gallery, The Reykjavik Art Festival 1998, Iceland

1996

''Please Don’t Move'', Bahnw?rterhaus, Gallery der Stadt, Esslingen

1995

''Xineses'', Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona

1994

''Maos Ungez?hmte Kinder'', R?mer Museum Hildesheim

Wang Ziyun

Wang Ziyun was a artist, born in Xuzhou, Jiangsu, China.

He went to Shanghai arts junior college in 1916. He moved to Paris, France to study, from 1931 to 1936.

After Anti-Japanese War breaks out, come back home and found and rescued a lot of Chinese national treasures. And then go to Shaanxi, Henan, Gansu, Qinghai and other places to carry on the research of China's ancient legacy.

Wang Tiande

Wang Tiande is a contemporary Chinese artist who focuses on site-specific artwork, as of November 2005.

Wang Lu

Wáng Lǚ ; ca. was a , calligrapher, and poet during the Ming Dynasty . His specific date of death is unknown.

Wang was born in Kunshan in the Jiangsu province . His style name was 'Andao' and his sobriquets were 'Jishou and Baodu laoren'. Wang's painting followed the style of Xia Gui. Some of his works included:
* ''Album Leaf Paintings of HuaShan''
* ''Shu Hui Album'' - twenty-one pieces
* ''Yi Yun Tong'' - one hundred volumes

Wang Guangyi

Wang Guangyi , is a artist known for being the leader of the New Art Movement circles that erupted out of China after 1989 and for his ''Great Criticism'' series of paintings, using the images of propaganda from the Cultural Revolution and contemporary brand names from western advertising. As an example, Artinfo notes that one of Wang Guangyis’s Great Criticism paintings ''“responds to the recent influx of advertising by juxtaposing the Coca-Cola logo with an image of a Chinese soldier, appropriating the visual iconography of both the Chinese Cultural Revolution and American pop art.”''

Alongside Yue Minjun, Zeng Fanzhi and Fang Lijun, Wang Guangyi belongs to China’s hottest new artists. His massive ''Mao AO'' painting from 1988 was sold for ?2,036,000 at a Phillips de Pury & Company auction in London in December 2007.”

Wang Guangyi was born in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province in 1956 or 1957. In 1984 Wang Guangyi graduated from the oil painting department of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. He currently lives and works in Beijing, China.

Solo Exhibitions

*2001 Wang Guangyi Solo Exhibition -信仰的面孔 , SHANGHART
*1997 Gallery Klaus Littmann , Basel
*1994 Wang Guangyi Solo Exhibition , Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong
*1993 Wang Guangyi Solo Exhibition , Bellefroid Gallery, Paris, France

Publications

* by Karen Smith, April, 2003
*Spalding, David. ''The Paintings of Wang Guangyi: Revolutionary Acts?'' January, 2006

Wang Du

Wang Du is a contemporary Chinese artist who focuses on three-dimensional painted objects. Traditionally trained in Guangzhou, he now lives and has his studio in Paris. His works show strong influences of contemporary Western art and culture, and represent his own notions of modernity and development, and his personal relationship with both China and the West.

Biography

Born in Wuhan, in Hubei Province, the son of a factory manager, Wang sketched and painted from a very young age, beginning to work for the Cultural Revolution government at the age of sixteen. He produced posters and painted interiors while working in mines and a steel company, while exercising his creative skills and ideas privately. He had his first exhibition in 1976, at the age of 20, the year that Mao died. Moving to Guangzhou, Wang took the entrance exams for university and failed them in 1977, but succeeded in 1981 and enrolled at the Guangzhou Institute of Fine Arts.

Though offered a diverse program in both traditional and Western art, Wang desired to broaden his horizons further. His experience, like that of many artists, during the Cultural Revolution was one of copying and producing propaganda, not of expressing or exercising creativity, and this mode of artistic education was simply too traditional for him. As China continued to open to public expression and greater freedoms for artists, Wang left university in 1985, without graduating.

Amidst a growing, burgeoning artistic community, Wang founded a group called "Southern," along with a number of other artists and intellectuals, to share in one another's work, and to engage in intellectual discussion. Together, they organized performances, and a wide variety of other artistic and intellectual works. He also organized talks at the local library, inviting a variety of speakers to lecture on a monthly basis, until, in late 1987, an agent of the who had been attending his lectures warned him to stop. He complied, fearing that if he did not, he could be imprisoned.

Two years later, after speaking out against corruption, he was arrested and imprisoned for nine months, after which he left for Paris, having married a French journalist he met in Guangzhou. He began to produce and exhibit art there, and gained a number of connections in the French art world through his wife. In 1992, at an exhibition in Switzerland, he was strongly influenced by the work of Jeffrey Deitch, and wrote about it in the first issue of a self-titled magazine, describing the intriguing notions Deitch's work evoked about humanity's artificial and rapid evolution, modern-day science having far more of an effect on society than history and traditional culture.

One of his major exhibitions which came shortly afterwards reflected his difficulties in adjusting to French society and culture, and involved three-dimensional painted objects drawn from images of his daily life in Paris. The influence of Deitch's ''Post Human'' exhibition was revealed in an exhibition by Wang in 1997, which featured sculptures or statues of nude figures who represented, Wang said, the people of the future, who enjoy the ability, through biotechnology, to redesign their bodies as they choose.

Art

These would be the first of many similar pieces created by Wang, human figures which represent gender play, and a more general play with the human form as a whole. Some of his figures are genderless, some decidedly female with grossly enlarged breasts, or highly muscular male figures. Many, whether sitting on the ground or suspended in the air, are cut off at the legs, or at the torso. One of his more famous pieces, perhaps, is of a young Chinese boy, only his upper half, pulling back on a slingshot, his forward hand greatly enlarged so as to indicate a play with and perspective.

Another exhibition, created in the same year and toured around the world, was called ''Cities on the Move''. In this, Wang experimented with concepts related to modern advertising and subliminal experiences. The exhibition included sculpture statues of prostitutes hidden around unexpected corners of the gallery, and watchtowers in the style of the Great Wall of China which emitted a myriad of background soundtracks, conversations and the like recorded by Wang in restaurants, karaoke bars, trains, and various other places around China.

Much of his work since then has focused on the relationship between the media and the public consciousness, and on the artificial controls and manipulation imposed by the media. He has been quoted as saying "I organize my projects just like the media do with reality." An exhibition called ''Disposable Reality'' and presented in 2000 features a number of his three-dimensional creations, derived directly out of magazine images also displayed in the gallery. These range from an American father and son at a shooting gallery to a nude blonde in front of a computer tuned to a porn website to snow leopards, Jacques Chirac, Jiang Zemin, and a Lebanese soldier bearing an AK-47.

His latest works have turned to large-scale sculptures representing crumpled up newspaper, either en masse in trash cans, buildings or other repositories, or individually, in giant exploded versions of ordinary, everyday trash.

Tsung Ping

Chinese artist and musician, lived 375-444 CE, and wrote the earliest text on landscape painting. He wrote that “Landscapes have a material existence, and yet reach also in a spiritual domain.”

Shi Jinsong

Shi Jinsong is an artist based in Wuhan and Beijing. He studied at Hubei Academy of Fine Arts.

He is particularly known for his debut ''Na Zha Baby Boutique'' exhibition, a series of stainless steel sculptures depicting baby accessories - rattle, cot, stroller, etc - made from razor-sharp blades . Chambers Fine Art described this work as a "dialogue, at once menacing and ironic, between the forms of mythic Chinese culture and modern day globalization". He returned to this theme for his ''Secret Book of Cool Weapons'', which portrayed corporate logos such as the Swoosh as martial arts weapons.

Shi has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including ''Shanghai Cool: Creative Reproduction'' at the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, ''Mahjong'' at Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland, ''Alors, La Chine?'' at the Pompidou Center in Paris, and ''Too Much Flavour'' at Chambers Fine Art in New York.

Shen Shaomin

Shen Shaomin is an artist based in Sydney and Beijing.

He has exhibited internationally in exhibitions including the 2006 Liverpool Biennial , ''Mahjong'' at Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland and ''Dialogue'' at East West Gallery in Melbourne.

Shao Fang Sheng

Shao Fang Sheng is a well known Chinese artist who is also one of the last remaining apprentices of Frank Lloyd Wright. Of Shao Fang, Olgivanna Lloyd-Wright observed she, “made friends with unmatched speed and always with those she could profit by most.” Upon arrival to the United States, she stayed with Frank Lloyd Wright and Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, where she cooked and entertained guests including John Wayne, and other actors and socialites. She taught Mandarin to John King Fairbank, a well known scholar from Harvard University, at the American Embassy in Nanking. Furthermore her ability to paint with watercolours was noticed by several well known painting masters and she was commissioned by the Nationalist Government of China, to duplicate the fresco within the Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves, situated in the Taklamakan Desert of China. Her late husband Sheng Pao Sheng was also an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright and a respected architect.

Early life

Shao came from a well known industrial family that had their roots in Changzhou, China. She was
born and raised during the overthrow of the Ching Dynasty and the founding of the Republic of China.

She was a very athletic youth, representing her city, Tientsin, as a short stop and nationally in softball as a teenager.

Shanglie Zhou

Shanglie Zhou: Visual artist. Born in Shanghai, 1958. Lives in Belgium.
Best known for her 1997 art event in a Delhaize supermarket in Antwerp in which she displayed works of art, shrinkwrapped and price tagged, amongst the ordinary store items. Shoppers could then load them into their trolley and pay at the counter. In this project she also performed as a normal employee of the store.
In 2003 and 2004 she staged a performance theater piece with refugees from refugee-camps in Belgium, "When The Moon Waxed Red- Experiments With Truth And Reconciliation".

Ren Jianhui

Ren Jianhui is a contemporary Chinese artist whose unique style of combining elements of Western and Chinese painting has brought him international success.

Zhu Yu (artist)

Zhu Yu is a performance artist living in Beijing, China. His work deals with subjects of morality.

Yu's most famous piece of conceptual art, titled "Eating People," was performed at a Shanghai arts festival in 2000. It consisted of a series of of him cooking and eating what is alleged to be a human fetus. One picture, via e-mail in 2001, provoked investigations by both the and Scotland Yard. In response to the public reaction, Mr. Yu stated, "No religion forbids cannibalism. Nor can I find any law which prevents us from eating people. I took advantage of the space between morality and the law and based my work on it". Close scrutinization of the picture would seem to indicate that it was in fact assembled from the head of a doll attached to the body of a duck, though this cannot be proven.