INTERVIEW WITH ARTISTS
COLLECTORS’ ART BOOK Vol. 2
featured artists
Celine Chen is a novel artist in Hong Kong. Inspired by the Russian paper-quilling master Yulia Brodskaya, Celine never stopped practicing and devoted herself ardently to creating paper-quilling art. Her artworks have a strong personality, with gorgeous integration of Oriental culture. She is one of the few Asian artists engaged in the creation of paper quilling.
Rena Kubota is a freelance illustrator, motion and graphic designer, and art director for the NFT collection. The excitement in her work is seeing people like her work, asking what the piece's meaning may be and why she chose certain details. She wants her story to be a beacon to young artists that struggled, as she did not give up hope in finding a purpose for her art in the professional environment.
Claire-louise Pitman is an eco-conscious, disabled, cameraless artist. This is done by using sustainable photographic light processes such as chlorophyll printing, cyanotype printing, and scanography, meaning no harm has been done to the environment. Through her research on visual impairment and Anomia Claire-louise expands her knowledge but still faces accessible barriers along the way.
YaXi Zhou is a fashion designer. She mostly focuses on the emotional connection with human beings. She has always been committed to sustainable design, and she is currently working on using natural plants for fabric dyeing. Her latest project, Freedom from Shadow, was inspired by people's anxiety regarding their appearance and enables viewers to explore the stories and experiences behind the physical changes.
Liao Qian 廖倩 (they/them) is a glass artist based in Brooklyn, NY. As a chronic trauma survivor, Chinese non-binary, bilingual & multicultural creative, Joss is devoted to making space and taking space in the form of art. As a survivor of domestic violence, socio-political trauma, and sexual assault, Joss aims to inspire shared tenderness and radical vulnerability.
Koo J is a South Korean artist, currently based in Seoul, South Korea. She works on photography with a warm color film camera. The loneliness and anxiety of everyday life in the crushed image, while recalling the feeling of excitement, also express various emotions, such as moments of the past and fears and expectations for the future. For painting, she works on abstractions to convey emotions.
Sümer Sayın is an interdisciplinary artist, working primarily with sculpture and installation. She makes interventions into found objects, using geometric elements, reflections, repetitions, and loops, altering their composition and function. By re-constructing some of the elements they are composed of, she assigns them new contexts and layers of meanings.
Gulbin Ozdamar Akarcay tries to understand the cultural, ideological, environmental, and sociological order of the world, as well as the ordinary structures of daily life, by reading, using and producing images, which will hopefully open up new doors to the future. She uses photography to conduct visual ethnographic research.
Kwong is a multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on oil painting and fiction writing. After learning the basics from art teachers, he developed his own artistic approach while serving in the journalistic field for 30 years. He usually starts with concepts in his painting process, and concepts are converted into symbols, which he uses to build up a connection between contemporary art and memories, history and his community.
Gianluca Lattuada is an Italian artist, who was born in 1988. Currently, he lives and works between Milan and Madrid. The recurring themes in Lattuada’s work are the energy of bodies, eroticism, violence and the transience of life (“memento mori” philosophy). His work has two goals: to give an overview of the issues of contemporary society and to create a new vision of the world that can help taking a step forward tomorrow.
Elaine B. Chao is a traditional-digital hybrid artist working in Queens, NY. Expanding on traditional techniques, she first composes paintings on canvas or paper using acrylic, oil, and other mixed media. She then imports the paintings into image manipulation programs to blend, apply filters, and run actions. The final digital work is printed or uploaded to an AR app for display.
Sophie Ruoyu Zhang is a Chinese artist, currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Working as a "diffraction apparatus", her practice utilizes multiple natural materials (napa cabbage, wine, coffee, etc.). Her oil painting, printmaking, and performance respond to and reinterpret the natural objects that are in a limbo of recognition, permeating poetics on the threshold of the subjecthood, the recognizable and the representable.
Rocio G Montiel, also known as "RGM", is a Mexican artist who lives in Los Angeles, California. Her series "A REAL BODY" is a 2 volume digital art series that speaks about inner beauty and self-love—a project to put us beyond the eye and see further the exterior of ourselves.
Yunah Seo is a South Korean artist, currently based in London. Her practice considers the internal and attempts to visualize inner reactions relating to personal circumstances, consisting of beliefs, emotions, perceptions, philosophies, and the notion of creation. She combines images and memories from her own life, laying them out across her materials in order to consider and develop intuitive insight into her life.
Kim Matthews makes nonobjective sculptures and drawings in various media. The frequent use of modular construction arose from practical concerns and spiritual ones, as repetition is evocative of the mantra meditation that structures her daily life. The ongoing Objects of Affection series was prompted by an urge to reclaim comforting childhood memories and honor the artists and designers whose work informed her early visual lexicon.
Monika Katterwe is a German photographer based in Luckenwalde. Using the Tyndall effect, Monika started by visualizing the light rays in different media and observing the interaction of light with crystals. She questions her observations on the formation of space in the fluid through the comparative analyses with scientific publications on this topic.
Daria Lou Nakov is a French visual artist. Her work is at the crossroads between installation, photography, and video. She sees photography as a way to create images and not simply capture the world around her. In a society so fueled with images, she likes to create surrealistic images to question our relation to the hyperrealistic image-based world.
Gülsah Ayla Bayrak (1997) is a multidisciplinary artist from Belgium. Ayla has roots in Turkey and Georgia, which influenced her work drastically. The artist creates connections between east and west and tries to overcome the imaginary border between the two continents. The artist focuses on Individual experience, cultural diaspora, and society's role in her life.
Shan Xu is a Multi-Media artist based in San Francisco and Beijing. Shan is an experimental, future-oriented new media artist whose passion lies in challenging cultural stereotypes and social preconceptions through building experiences of future-present intersections. Her works expand technologies' possibilities to address "digital and natural" challenges and inspire conversation through a digital and natural conflict lens.
Milena ZeVu is a Serbian artist based in Belgrade. She always wanted her art to be more dynamic. Her latest series, ArtWalks, emphasizes her need to free art from the conventional exhibition space and the dominant western system of contemporary art, to which most artists are strongly subordinated. Milena unites with her art to defend it and preserve art's supreme independence and freedom.
Liu Gongjie is a designer and visual artist based in London. His latest project, Emotionally Harmonious Cyborg Future, is a speculative design work. It explores a possible future in the form of a dance drama, where human beings take the initiative to transform themselves into a cyborg that combines the physical and mechanical and can perceive the emotions of others directly.
Suyu Chen is a Chinese contemporary jewelry and craft artist based in Rochester, NY. Her works are inspired by her personal experiences of living in different places and the relationships of her cultural background. Through repetitive experimental explorations of alternative materials and fine metal practices, her works got unique consequences and forms.
Pavlina Vagioni’s art is all about alchemy, re-enchanting the contemporary world through the timelessness of the myths and legends of her Hellenic heritage. She renders the symbols and archetypes behind them to reveal their relevance and aliveness and bridge the chasm between Cartesian rationalism and the spirituality of human beings, nature, and the cosmos.
Shuqi You is a New York-based fashion designer. You's design and art approach is based on a lengthy period of individual experimentation with materials and three-dimensional objects, with an emphasis on media characteristics, technique development, and physical existence. In her current participatory project, Wiegenlied D498, she examined the contradictions between personal memories and immediate circumstances.
Hao Wen Chung, also known as Claudia, is a graphic designer and artist who was born in Taiwan and currently splits her time between residing in Taipei, Taiwan, and Brooklyn, New York. Although she is an accomplished designer with an eye for precision, her photography and ceramic artworks reveal another side of her that is emotive, free-spirited, and exquisite. The naturalness of things can be seen in Claudia's artwork.
Kelly Zhong was born in Vancouver, BC, and currently works in New York, NY. She views her artwork as informal self-portraits – drawings that reflect parts of herself without ever showing actual facial features. Instead, body language is used to convey mental states and actions. From this ambiguity, she invites viewers to reflect on similar experiences and cast their own perspectives on situations.
Rebecca Yunjeong Lee is Korean born artist, originally from Seoul, South Korea. Yunjeong's work is a reflection of the past. Inspired by trauma suffered as a young person, her work is a self-portrait viewed through the lens of traumatic memory and is part of the process of moving forward with her life. Louise Borgeois, Tracey Emin and Francis Bacon all influenced the works, which were Yunjeong's first foray into using digital applications to create art.
Nora Papp is a Swiss artist born and based in Zürich, Switzerland. Nora Papp combines her interest in human perception and the digital photographic picture with her investigation of the image as an object. She develops her works with the help of common image processing programmes on the computer, where she collects "aesthetic data" through the dissection of the digital image.
Jiaming Zhang is a Chinese artist, currently based in America. He is an avid observer and constantly draws inspiration from the space and dynamics around him.In his latest series, Space #, Zhang uses simple lines to express his environmental awareness on canvas. Sensual and innately, exposed to the space, each painting carries its own emotional tone and narrative - just like every inch of air, with a unique smell, movement, and mood.
Ali Fawad is a self-taught digital sculptor/teacher, based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Through working with both camera and computer, he creates images that seek to challenge and problematise traditional conceptions of photography, sculpturing and painting. Techniques and understandings from these fields – such as carving, layering of colour or the interplay of light - are used to produce images that capture the spirit of the locality.
Anita Tiwary is an Indian visual artist, currently based in New Delhi. Anita Tiwary's paintings are the thread of her inner journey of known, unknown, and beyond for an eternity which reflects in her Soulscapes, Dream Narratives, and Abstract representational art. Anita Tiwary's work is about the interconnection of all kinds of beings with nature and the universe.
Rūta Matulevičiūtė is a painter and interdisciplinary artist. She is based in Vilnius, where, with five colleagues, she co-founded the artist-run space and studios "Tapytoju studijos". Her method is consciousness-based creativity with a focus on personal development. For this reason, she focuses on meditation, psychology, ancient traditions, and, most importantly, the broad Baltic mythology rooted in Indo-European culture.
Bo Zhang is an artist, designer, and co-curator, based between Beijing and New York. Creativity and originality are the most solid foundations on which his works can be recognized and loved. He believes a good artwork should be sentimental, have a soul, not a cold entity, but a wonderful interaction with people. He is the founder of Desz office, a young creative studio that mixes art, design, material, and communications.
Painting is just like a bridge for Michael Kwong, linking himself and the outside world together. He can express his attitude toward life and his thought about things, and more importantly, he can interact with people through his artworks. He wants to use his painting to spread a positive power to people and bring a better and prettier world to people through his paintings.
Marco Lando's work is influenced by his New York theatre background. Combining existential plot lines, dramatic lighting, and surrealist stage design, the otherworldly mise-en-scenes he creates operate on a visceral, symbolic level. His latest series, the post-apocalyptic realm of Alchemy, evokes a timeless spiritual abyss where atonement and purification seem forever out of reach.
Allan Linder is a prolific, award-winning artist with more than thirty years of experience producing a wide range of artwork using multiple mediums and subject matter. He fabricates paintings, drawings, digital artwork, mixed media artworks, and sculptures, using a variety of materials and substrates. His recent work Cityscapes are a collection of hand-painted artworks scanned at high resolution and digitally painted.
Marija Toskovic's work is based on an abstract “self-landscape,” which aims to redefine the perception of an external projection of the inner identity. She is interested in exploring the idea of (im)permanence of the “other side” on the horizon and in the landscape, which defines the immutability of intimate geography in her work.
Yu-Ching Wang was born in Taipei, Taiwan and now lives and works in New York. She is an interdisciplinary artist and works in video, performative action, spatial installation, and photography. Yu-Ching's recent works focus on exploring the social and cultural elements in the environment around her through the lens of her identity as a foreigner. She strives for the moment people become aware of unexpected realities provoked by her projects.
Shurooq Amin is a mixed-media interdisciplinary Kuwait artist and an Anglophone poet who aims to instigate positive change in society. As an artist, her work reflects the socio-political dichotomy of the region she lives in, albeit sarcastically, by holding up a mirror to society, loud and unequivocally clear, drawing people in and allowing them to open a dialogue.
Christine Comeau is a visual artist and cultural worker. Her practice is based on multidisciplinary installation, sculpture, and living poetry. Her research focuses on mobility, exile, constraint, and the physical and mental boundaries created by travel. Current tropes in her work are the tent, a portable shelter that accompanies us on our travels, and clothes. She lives and works in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada.
Ester Crocetta is an Italian visual artist. Her latest project, CHICCHIRIA Poultry, is a summary of years of deep interior reflection. The concept of the CHICCHIRIA Poultry is the theme of “ANIMAL FOOD”. Our liberated, consumerist society is still struggling to evolve towards this new theme. History has caused us to reflect on the balance and harmony within nature, teaching new limits regarding the excessive consumption of meat.
Brett Ashby's practise spans painting, sculpture, film, theatre, sound, and installation. The multi-disciplinary artist, known for adopting unorthodox methodologies of practice, has explored multimedia forms of art creation since starting his practise in 2006 in London. Ashby presents new work that pushes against the binary that trauma is equally from the land as in people.
Man Zhu is a fine art photographer originally from China, and currently based in New York. Her latest series, UnFrame: Relationship, is a body of photo-based works through which she explores her subconscious behavior by showing her relationships with people around her. The creative process draws on the principles of semiotics, appropriating and retaining each subject’s past, and integrating them into self-portraiture.
Ayuna guides the people into her works through personas. In addition, she expresses the nature that exists as it is, that natural process of winding and unwinding, and the weak and the strong in an effort to make a barrier against the violence she got through. Through such a process, she would save herself. She also wishes that somebody who views her works would be empowered to live in this violent world.
Kohlben Vodden is an Australian-born self-taught artist living and working in London, UK. His obsession with psychological concepts such as identity and aesthetics is central to his practice.Focusing on abstracted figurative works in oil paint, he employs insights from psychology and uses a bold geometric style with intense colour palettes to command the viewers’ attention and communicate stories of identity.
Kelly Borgers is a contemporary Canadian artist, bases in Blue Mountains. Her work explores the use of texture and colour within the confines of a painting. Abstracted with minimal symbolism, she delves into the power of the mind and how emotions can overpower our sense of calmness. Many of her pieces are inspired by the recent events of enduring the pandemic and multiple lockdowns and isolation.
Mike Goldberg is a contemporary artist living in San Francisco, originally from NYC. He has long found inspiration and beauty in the nooks and crannies of ordinary life, painting the untold stories of people he's encountered throughout the years. Mike explores how memories universally define and shape the human experience through his interactive installation.
Diego Esquivel aka [ctrl_v] is a New Media artist born in Costa Rica. His work has been continuously developed due to his interest in bringing the digital into the physical world, so it's been characterized by using non-traditional media, such as vjing, digital compositions, projection mapping, and, more recently, augmented and virtual reality.
Milena Deparis is a French-Argentinian photographer based in the U.K. Her latest series, Hidden Canvases, explores the aesthetic beauty of our world's unseen and hidden images. Hidden Canvases is a motto that has come to encompass her photographic approach and style, as well as her perception of beauty and how she chooses to capture it.
Originally from Hangzhou, China, Chao Wang is an artist who now works from New York. Her works are characterized by the presence of both organic and artificial elements, in a fusion that explores the human relationship with technology. Chao Wang is interested in how human-being interact with an increasingly technological society, exploring this through intriguing motifs.
Fernando Madera Alvarado is a Mexican artist. His work is mostly composed of bidimensional surfaces: paper of all sorts, canvases, walls, or wood panels. For the last couple of years, his work has been focused on acrylic ink compositions. He also works with digital software to modify his ink sketches and compile them for use on larger compositions.
Marcello Silvestre’s artworks narrate the city through the emotions, the smells, the flavors and the noises. He relates the indissoluble relationship between man and city sculpting bodies, legs and arms on which he lets towers and houses arise in a continuous flow. He creates dreamlike visions and interweaving of soft lines, triangles and edges.

Maya Smira is a multidisciplinary artist using video, photography, dance, performance & installation. She explores global and interpersonal issues and is interested in land changes, geographic, social and psychological processes. As a traveling artist, the physical space allows her to express new aspects of herself, while also talking about questions in society and the environment.