Artworks & exhibitions by Chinese artists

41 articles

Lin Yilin - Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road, 1995, performance, Guangzhou, China feat

Lin Yilin’s performance – Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road

Performances, Video Art / 4 minutes of reading
Lin Yilin needs no introductions in the world of performance art. As one of the most well-known Chinese artists, Yilin has made a name for himself for his contemporary interventions and performance pieces that often criticize China’s extreme urbanization, modernization, commercial globalization, as well as its geopolitical conflicts. Lin was born in Guangzhou, China, and […]

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Xu Zhen’s In just a blink of an eye – Defying the laws of physics?

Performances, Sculptures / 5 minutes of reading
Have you ever seen one of those perfectly timed photos that capture the exact moment someone begins to fall on their bum? With modern technology, it is not hard to capture that “perfect moment”. However, capturing that “perfect moment” in a live performance is nearly impossible; unless you are Xu Zhen. Chinese artist Xu Zhen

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Who is photographer Hai Bo?

Photography / 4 minutes of reading
Hai Bo, born in 1962, is a photographer with special interests in intangible photography. His works usually aim at documenting changes in the social and economic environments of society. The main characteristic that defines Hai’s aesthetic is the fact that he captures the everyday moment and, at the same time, tries to compare the beauty

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Zeng Fanzhi’s Last supper – One of China’s most expensive paintings

Paintings / 4 minutes of reading
Zeng Fanzhi’s The Last Supper is one of the most noteworthy Asian contemporary pieces of art. Throughout his career, Zeng Fanzhi has been working to make Chinese art more popular. His artwork is known for offering an honest critique of the contemporary Chinese lifestyle while creating a much-needed dialogue between Eastern and Western philosophies. His

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Yang Fudong’s Coloured Sky – Dream & nightmare of the idealized woman

Photography / 3 minutes of reading
Yang Fudong’s multi-screen video installation titled The Coloured Sky: New Women II was created in 2014 to portray today’s radiantly colored world. Though Yang had racked up a reputation for himself for working with film, The Coloured Sky: New Women was actually the artist’s first piece of color digital film. Composition The multi-screen video installation

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Song Dong’s Waste Not – Why obsessive hoarding lead to this project

Architecture, Installations / 3 minutes of reading
Song Dong’s Waste Not is an installation with a story behind it. A testament born of the artist’s mother, Zhao Xiangyuan’s hoardings, the installation consists of tools, plant pots, chairs, empty squeezed out tubes of toothpaste, television sets, all collected over a span of five decades. This obsessive hoarding of items resulted in an accumulation

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Interview with artist Li Wei: From vision to creation

Interviews, Photography / 7 minutes of reading
Li Wei’s work is anything but cautious. In fact, it can be described as peculiar or quirky, depending on your perception of life. Characterized by bodies that are often positioned in near-impossible angles, such as buried in windscreens and toppling off skyscrapers, Li Wei’s bizarre works are distinctive. His popularity and rise to fame were

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Huaxi is China’s richest village. Shi Yangkun took these photos

Photography / 2 minutes of reading
At the middle of the 1980s the collectivization process ended up failing in China. But even so, there are repercussions to deal with and the countryside in particular still retains some of the ideas such as individualism, privatization or marketization. There are villages like Huaxi, Nanjie or Dazhai that continue to be collectivized. This is

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Do Yue Minjun’s self portraits make you laugh?

Paintings / 3 minutes of reading
Yue Minjun’s style is easily be recognized. His self-portrait oil paintings depict himself in vivid colors while grinning with his mouth gaping. An oxymoron of sorts, the self-portraits evoke feelings of sympathy as well as humor. The depictions of himself in various poses laughing draw numerous diverse interpretations. However, the general consensus is that while

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Huang Yong Ping created the longest snakes you have ever seen

Sculptures / 3 minutes of reading
A massive snake in real life? Absolutely frightening. A massive snake skeleton, aluminum and stainless steel structure, on the other hand? Absolutely exciting and awe-inspiring. Such is the Chinese-French artist Huang Yong Ping’s unique aluminum snake sculpture, an installation he dubbed Ressort. Designed and installed in 2012 for the Queensland Art Gallery in Australia, this

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Ai Weiwei’s Forever Bicycles: Thousands of bicycles transformed into sculptures

Sculptures / 3 minutes of reading
Bicycles have always featured in Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s installations. The very first time that Ai used bicycles was in his installation known as Very Yao in 2008. As the years have passed, his use of bicycles has only gotten grander as is evident in his piece titled the Forever Bicycles. In Forever Bicycles, Ai

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People Architecture Office & their giant Chinese character installation

Architecture, Installations / 2 minutes of reading
In 2015, a Chinese studio known as People’s Architecture Office made waves on art and architecture media when they used metal air conditioning pipes to create large-scale Chinese characters on the front exterior of the Tabular Baitasi Visitor center during the Beijing Design Week. The Tabular Baitasi Visitor center has long been used to host

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Zhang Huan in suit made from raw meat (video)

Performances / 3 minutes of reading
Zhang Huan is one of China’s best known conceptual and performance artists. In his sculptures and paintings, he references the history of his home country. As such, his pieces contain components of political, religious and intellectual messages and anonymous portrait and landscape scenes. Most of his works are deeply influenced by Chinese culture, while some

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Banned: Sun Yuan & Peng Yu’s controversial dog video

Performances, Video Art / 3 minutes of reading
The video work titled Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other has only recently been removed from Guggenheim Museum’s exhibition series known as Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World. The video series has been met with disapproval and disparagement not only by some art critics but animal lovers and welfare organizations as well.

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Li Hongbo’s stunning flexible sculptures are not what they seem

Sculptures / 2 minutes of reading
Li Hongbo is an artist based in Beijing, China and creates unusual and surprising art pieces from paper. A designer and book editor, Li Hongbo started collecting and experimenting with his ideas with paper after being inspired by the festive ‘paper gourd’ decorations and traditional Chinese boys’ toys. These pieces have a simple but amazing

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