ORIGINAL ISSUE15

INTERVIEW | Yimei Zhu

INTERVIEW | Yimei Zhu

Yimei (Emair) Zhu is an interdisciplinary artist. Her art, spanning interactive wearables to bio-art, challenges conventional views on disability, aiming to redefine human interaction and perception through the fusion of art and technology. By exploring new sensory worlds and advocating for posthumanism, Yimei invites audiences to experience life from diverse, inclusive perspectives.

INTERVIEW | Xiaohan Jiang

INTERVIEW | Xiaohan Jiang

Jiang Xiaohan is a painter and poet from China, currently based in Chicago. Drawing inspiration from memories of the past and visions of imagination, Xiaohan paints the nostalgic bonds between her homeland's landscapes and nature; through her personal experiences, she explores the pursuit of faith and self-redemption against the backdrop of East Asian cultural and political contexts.

INTERVIEW | Zhiyan Cai

INTERVIEW | Zhiyan Cai

Zhiyan, a 3D artist and former architect, currently resides in London. Her creative endeavors delve deep into the intricate relationships between culture and technology, history and the future. Zhiyan takes pleasure in weaving together elements of Asian culture with futurism and science fiction themes, presenting a unique perspective through the lens of femininity.

INTERVIEW | Keyi Liu

INTERVIEW | Keyi Liu

China-born, London-based Keyi Liu is a Multimedia artist and Illustrator. Her works often take the confrontational relationship between human nature and societal rules as a starting point, analyzing the changes in human psychology under the oppression of various societal issues. The Last Dream series is a collection of illustrations created during the 2021 pandemic, exploring my reflections on constraints and freedom.

INTERVIEW | Siyu Liu

INTERVIEW | Siyu Liu

Siyu Liu, originally from China, is an architect and artist based in Spain. After working in the architecture area for six years, she turned her direction into craft with intercultural and identity research during the pandemic. Through her craftworks, she focuses on intercultural research, uncovering and elucidating subtle differences in various cultures that arise from the same physical elements.

INTERVIEW | Di Tian

INTERVIEW | Di Tian

Di Tian is a New York-based new-media artist from Chongqing, China. Through his current interactive and time-based artworks, Di challenges the notion of art as a solitary experience. His current body of work doesn't adhere to a specific theme; instead, it is a canvas for exploration that covers a diverse range of subjects, including folk culture, artificial intelligence, contemporary social issues, and so on.

INTERVIEW | Lisha Liang

INTERVIEW | Lisha Liang

Lisha Liang is a Chinese artist currently living in Italy. Lisha Liang's artistic endeavors are deeply rooted in the exploration of gender dynamics and the pervasive issue of gender-based violence. Motivated by a growing concern for these societal challenges, Liang's work serves as a conscientious reflection and an invitation to engage with the feminist discourse.

INTERVIEW | Qiurui Du

INTERVIEW | Qiurui Du

Qiurui Du is a Chinese artist and curator. He is committed to giving voice to young Asian artists and curating exhibitions to showcase their work. In his work, he observes people's lives from his unique perspective and brings the hustle and bustle of unique experiences around him into his works. Qiurui Du constructs a virtual world through his childhood fantasies and memories.

INTERVIEW | Ziyi Zhang

INTERVIEW | Ziyi Zhang

Ziyi Zhang is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. Currently teaching at SAIC, her work encompasses painting, installation, and interactive media, delving into unconventional explorations of human conditions. Her series Family Photo Album is an interactive, browser-based work of art, an exploration of notions of truth, cultural and generational disconnect, and the relationship between social class and art.

INTERVIEW | Yuehan Hao

INTERVIEW | Yuehan Hao

Yuehan Hao is an artist who focuses on visual creation. Her work takes as its theme the dialectical and contradictory relationship between the stillness of life and the retention of photography. It reflects on the relationship between the mother's death and the changes in family relationships and creates discussions around the correlation between the spiritual consciousness of life and the body's images.

INTERVIEW | Qinying Cai

INTERVIEW | Qinying Cai

Qinying Cai was born in China and specializes in emotionally evocative oil paintings. Her artistic journey, rooted in childhood as a refuge from dyslexia, has evolved into a captivating exploration of classical artistry. As a talented storyteller, Qinying Cai invites viewers to connect and feel the common threads of our shared human experience, as well as reminds us of the fleeting nature of emotions and life experiences.

INTERVIEW | Misha Waks

INTERVIEW | Misha Waks

Misha Waks refers to themes related to ecology, women's rights, and minorities. He is inspired by current events, news, and images from the internet, press, and television. He explores topics related to the concepts of post-nature and the Anthropocene. He uses various means of expression; among the most important are painting, sculpture, installations, performance, and video.

INTERVIEW | Yueting Wu

INTERVIEW | Yueting Wu

Ada Yueting Wu is an interdisciplinary artist born in China and currently based in the United States. Through installation, performance, and sound, she creates visceral experiences that critically examine the production of silence and truth within systems of control. By subjecting the body to counter forces or exposing it as a malfunctioning circuit within various systems, she scrutinizes relationships of powers and disciplines.

INTERVIEW | Chris Arnold

INTERVIEW | Chris Arnold

Chris Arnold is a Chicago-based contemporary artist and illustrator. Currently, his work is focused on environmental expressionism, with notable collections featuring animals, botanicals, and landscapes. He is inspired by the beauty of nature and champions its conservation. Influenced by the vivid aesthetics of comic art from his youth, his paintings embody bold colors and dynamic linework characteristics.

INTERVIEW | Ruoyan Er

INTERVIEW | Ruoyan Er

Ruoyan Er is an artist in the fashion realm, specializing in draping, garment construction, and textiles. As a storytelling designer, she skillfully uses design to convey emotions, serving as a visual language narrator. She merges natural textures with fashion aesthetics, integrating the unique qualities weathering brings. Each fabric tells a story of time passing, and her designs echo the wonders of continuous change and rebuilding.

INTERVIEW | Stefano Scarafia

INTERVIEW | Stefano Scarafia

Stefano Scarafia is an Italian filmmaker and visual artist. In his collages, the images take on the form of geometries, simple subjective mental suggestions, pure imagination, and pieces of fantasies. His collages are assemblages of remnants, attempting to forge an emotional connection with the observer. They challenge their perception of reality, offering a moment of disorientation.

INTERVIEW | Mengmeng Luo

INTERVIEW | Mengmeng Luo

Mengmeng Luo (Momo) is a Chinese visual artist born in 1999 in Changsha, Hunan province, now living and working in London. Her artworks consist of visual images and sound effects. She specialises in creating scene-based fragments of cinematic space that combine to form non-temporal sequential narratives and are characterised by her own personal magical realism and black irony.

INTERVIEW | Xinyi Yang

INTERVIEW | Xinyi Yang

Xinyi Yang is a young potential artist and interdisciplinary designer. Her paintings, which combine ancient East Asian poetry beauty with the reflection of contemporary philosophy, primarily feature oil and watercolour, exuding vitality as they continually explore light within darkness, specifically reflected in the relationship between people and the environment.

INTERVIEW | Tairan Hao

INTERVIEW | Tairan Hao

Tairan Hao, based in New York, is a new media artist. His work serves as an exploration and a dialogue, delving into the complexities of identity within the shifting landscapes of politics, culture, and technology. His work, rooted in personal experiences of conformity, offers a lens to examine the individual's place among the collectivism of society.

INTERVIEW | Gøneja ✷

INTERVIEW | Gøneja ✷

Gøneja ✷ is a photographer and totemic sculptor based in Berlin. His practice represents an artistic quest to establish a connection with the spiritual world and explore it within the boundaries of the contemporary urban context. He combines classical photography and totemic sculpture to unfold a new mythological narrative. Spirituality is a means to discern contemporary mythological possibilities and unravel them in his work as active magical forces.