RADII is proud to collaborate with pioneering financial institution East West Bank on the special project “Stories on Canvas.” Over the coming months we’ll be taking a close look at the shape of contemporary painting and Asian identity through the lens of the expansive East West Bank Collection. Stay tuned as we spotlight Asian artists who are making their voices heard and connecting cultures!
Is technology going to erase tradition? A new wave of Chinese artists thinks otherwise
Immersive digital art experiences are catching on, but some are starting to question the value of an exhibition with no real artworks
AI-powered art is advancing quickly. Here, two of China’s most celebrated experimental artists consider what AI art means for humanity
We joined the multi-hyphenate artist-designer on the road in Gansu as she researched the province and what it means for our geoengineered future
The photo series ‘Yù’ profiles an amateur troupe of older citizens in North China who carry on the legacy of traditional Chinese Yu opera
AI-powered art is advancing quickly. Here, two of China’s most celebrated experimental artists consider what AI art means for humanity
Copyright © 2024 RADII MEDIA
Copyright © 2024 RADII MEDIA
Throughout his career, Zheng Chongbin (b. 1961, Shanghai, lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area) has held classical Chinese ink tradition and Western pictorial abstraction in productive mutual tension. Exploring and deconstructing their conventions and constituents — figure, texture, space, geometry, gesture, materiality — he has developed a distinctive body of work that makes the vitality of matter directly perceptible. Central to Zheng’s art is the notion, inherent in pre-modern Chinese and Daoist thought, of the world as always in flux.
Over the years, Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957, Quanzhou) has worked with a broad range of creative mediums, from painting, installation, video art, and performance art, to new technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), NFTs, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. Grounded in the conceptual foundations of Eastern philosophy and contemporary social issues, his often site-specific artworks interpret and respond to the local culture and history, establishing a dialogue between viewers and the larger universe around them.
Tidawhitney Lek (b. 1992, Long Beach, CA) is a Cambodian-American painter. Her work plays with narrative and the everyday experience of a first-generation American born to immigrant parents. Her bright and somber paintings present nuances of domesticity. Figures and hands interact in her compositions as cultural Southeast-Asian elements echo through mundane objects. Lek reinvents the conventional mediums of pastel, acrylic, and oil paints on canvas, interchanging textures as pictorial spaces recede and soften.
Yu Hong (b. 1966, Xi’an) studied oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing in 1980s, graduating from the oil painting department in 1988. Since 1988 she has been a teacher at CAFA. Yu Hong’s first major American museum show opened in September 2023 at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA and her work was featured in “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” (2017) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Han Bing (b. 1986, Shandong province) is recognised for her sensitive yet disruptive visual language in paintings that deconstruct pictorial reality and open up new dimensions. Having recently moved to Paris after living in New York, Los Angeles and Shanghai, her practice draws on urban elements, including street scenes and architectural façades. She takes inspiration from the textures and patterns that appear in cities — especially the “errors” and “glitches” generated by ripped posters.
Greg Ito’s (b. 1987, Los Angeles) highly stylized, visually flat dream-like paintings present portals to an alternative world, often seen through meticulous renderings of keyholes and windows, referencing a personal lexicon of symbols and imagery — burning candles, snakes, moons, and suns through which he inhabits a state of lucid dreaming in which daily life dilates into fantasy. Ito, who received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, has developed a signature cinematic style that combines moments of drama with a distinct, vivid color palette.
Xu Zhen (b. 1977, Shanghai) is one of the representative figures of his generation of Chinese contemporary artists. He has gained international recognition for his innovative and provocative practice. Xu Zhen has been active on the global art scene since the late 1990s, often exploring such themes as cultural identity, globalization, and consumerism. His work spans a variety of media, including installation, sculpture, painting, photography, and performance. In addition to being an artist, he is also a curator, founder of MadeIn Company and XU ZHEN®.
Zhu Jinshi (b. 1954, Beijing) is a pioneer of Chinese abstract art and installation art. He began to create abstract paintings in the early 1980s and moved to Berlin in 1986. Since then, he has been experimenting with performance, installation, and conceptual art. In 1994, Zhu returned to China, dividing his time between Berlin and Beijing until 2010. At present, he lives and works in Beijing.
M aka Michael Chow was born in 1939 into a family of theater in Shanghai. His father Zhou Xinfang, the grandmaster of Peking Opera, is regarded as a national treasure to this day. He attended Saint Martin’s School of Art and had a brief career in painting until the late 1960s when he opened the restaurant MR CHOW in London’s Knightsbridge. After a fifty-year sabbatical, Chow would re-ignite his passion for painting. In 2015, his solo show “Voice For My Father” was exhibited at UCCA in Beijing, China, followed by Power Station of Art in Shanghai.
Cui Jie (b. 1983, lives and works in Shanghai) is a contemporary artist. Her artworks depict cityscapes filled with references to past, present, and future modernist architecture. Her paintings are composed of linear forms, sharp perspectives, and multiple layers to produce re-imaginings or recompositions of existing architectural sites. Cui’s paintings comment on how a society experiences rapidly changing urban landscapes and our surroundings shape our identities. Cui’s work has been exhibited in many cultural institutions in China, the US, and Europe. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, France; Museum of Modern Art, NY; and the M+ Collection in Hong Kong. Cui Jie is currently represented by Pilar Corrias Gallery, London and Antenna Space, Shanghai.