624 Ye Nan (1984) Trained under Qiu Zhijie of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, Ye engages us directly with great, sometimes imponderable questions. Distinguished by his use of a deep red palette, Ye's works indicate a strong sense of curiosity and acceptance towards new things. Yeung Tong Lung (1956) Yeung moved to Hong Kong in 1973 as a teenager. In addition to painting full-time, he had previously worked as a mural artist and set painter for interior designers, photographers and film directors. Despite not having any formal qualifications, he is considered one of Hong Kong's best oil painters, with works exhibited in the HK Museum of Art and the HK Economic and Trade Office in Geneva. Yeung's works deal with the landscape and the space of people in both physical and psychological states. Yin Zhaoyang (1970) Graduated from the print department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1996, Yin's work, while squarely situated within the context of contemporary Chinese painting, directly references the western tradition of the 1960’s and 1970’s – recalling the work of Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol. Unlike the genre of political pop, gaudy art, or kitsch, within which the image of Mao is so often positioned, Yin presents these powerful images within an atmosphere of memory and ambiguous reflection. Working from photographs of the living Mao, both official and unofficial, as well as from images of memorial monuments, Yin explores the distanced relevance of Mao Zedong to a society that has largely repudiated the policies of the Great Leap forward and the Cultural Revolution. Yu Aishan (1981) Currently living and working in London, Yu holds an MFA from the Slade School of Art in London and a BA from Sichuan Academy of Fine Art in China. Her work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions throughout China and UK. Yu's recent paintings intuitively explore her personal interest in photographic realism and non-representational textures. She explores the field of portraiture through this combination to express the inner emotions of modern day humanity. Chromatically muted but melancholically seductive, her paint touches wood only to reluctantly register some ghostly presence. Time appears suspended, held in some precarious balance between the different realms. Yu Jidong (1976) A graduate of Beijing's Minzu University, Yu can be seen as a contemporary literati artist, with his focus on capturing the essential characteristics of ink painting. Minimalist and with absolute precision, he explores the patterns, shading and subtle nuances of the medium. Much like his mentor, Zhang Yu, Yu Jidong's almost scientific approach and visual deconstruction of ink painting brings his works into the realm of performance. Since 2002, Yu has participated in a number of group exhibitions around the world. Yu Hong (1966) Yu graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Oil Painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1988, and completed her Masters degree in 1995. Her artistic practice revolves around her personal experience as a woman, taking inspiration from both her own life and the lives of others around her. The world that she creates through her art encapsulates a sense of time and memory that is intermingled in the delicate, often domestic scenes that she portrays, resulting in large-scale works that are personal and emotionally reflective. Only rarely in the entire history of Chinese art has the female point of view been depicted in such an understanding and understated manner. Yu regularly appropriates iconic western and eastern classical antiquity in the attempt to create artworks that are universal, transcending all cultural barriers. Her autobiographical approach to the art world, friends, family and personal experiences against the upheavals of recent Chinese history, give worldchanging events a more human significance and puts private milestones into a much wider context. As one of China's most renowned female artists, Yu has exhibited extensively around the world and her works can be found in leading public collections, including Ludwig Gallery (Germany) and Singapore Art Museum. Yuan Yuan (1973) Yuan graduated with a BA from the China Academy of Art (Oil Painting) in 1996 and went on to complete the MFA programme in 2008. Now living and working in Hangzhou, Yuan has exhibited extensively around the world, including a solo exhibition at Art Basel Hong Kong 2014, Bazaar Art Jakarta (Indonesia), White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney (Australia), and JGM Gallery, Paris (France). Inspired by Western artists such as Richard Long, best known for creating "art made by walking in landscapes", and Felix GonzalezTorres, Yuan's subjects are largely interiors based on real places in China, with some additional imaginery elements. Yuan Yuan (1984) Yuan presents intimate canvases in frames, "Polaroid inspired paintings", made from Jindezhen porcelain, a borderline kitschiness that’s only exacerbated by the subject matter: young Chinese girls, many posing with flowers or balloons or, in one case, a camera. Yuan translates photographic elements — like the washed-out white shock of a camera’s flash — in a way that can be interesting, but ultimately she excels when she leaves human beings out of the picture entirely. Her larger, abstracted landscape works such as "Castle" are aesthetically more intriguing than the sentimental portraits. Z Zeng Fanzhi (1964) Zeng's paintings are immediately recognisable by their signature expressionistic style, an effect that lends provocative sensations of underlying violence, psychological tension, or supernatural aura to his lavishly rendered canvases. With subjects ranging from portraits and rural landscapes to politically charged motifs, Zeng infuses the everyday veneer of shared experience with an ambience of transgression, reflective of both the rapidly changing terrain of contemporary Chinese culture and the negotiation of personal identity within this societal flux. Zeng's magnificent landscapes express the vast conceptual gulf between individual cognition and the actuality of environment. Painting with two brushes simultaneously, Zeng uses one to describe his subject, while the other meanders the canvas, leaving traces of his subconscious through processes. Through this combination of painterly realism and 'automatic' expression, Zeng's landscapes are transformed into near abstract fields; the depicted people and places merging both memory and imagination. Zhang Chunhong (1971) "To me, Chinese contemporary art is like a bird let out of a cage." The daughter of art teachers whose two sisters are also artists, Zhang was schooled from an early age in the rigours of gongbi, the classical ink brush technique rendering subjects with intricate precision. Now living in the US, Zhang has been widely exhibited in China and internationally. Zhang Dali (1963) Zhang's work actively engages with the rapidly changing environment in China. Zhang started working in portraiture as one of Beijing's first graffiti artists, spraying and carving heads into the walls of the hundreds of buildings scheduled for destruction. Working across a wide variety of media - from urban art, to archiving photographs of Mao, and large scale installations - Zhang's portraits document a contemporary social history of a culture in radical development and flux. Chinese Offspring is one of Zhang's best known works. Consisting of 15 cast resin figures suspended from the ceiling, each sculpture is a representation of a migrant construction worker, a vast underclass who contribute to the modernisation process at it most visible level. Since 2003, Zhang has made 100 of these effigies in tribute to their unsung heroism. Zhang's work not only champions the individual plights of these transient labourers, but also records the one of the most important phenomena of new Chinese order: the growing schism between poverty and wealth. Zhang Ding (1980) Mixing installation and video-art, Zhang is quickly emerging as one of the most provocative and intriguing of China's new generation of artists. Unapologetically voyeuristic, Zhang's installation ”Pry” (2005ongoing) explores the relationship between the viewer and the viewed, superiority and inferiority, exploiter and exploited. This is done with rare sensitivity and nonjudgmental loyalty towards featured destinies, all of which share a common denominator of difference. These differences are manifested sexually, religiously and politically, and often with severe consequences to the protagonists. The installation, which also incorporates photographs, belongs to the tradition of socially conscious documentary film. Zhang Ding’s interest in the personal stories of anonymous individuals can be seen in his archival project on missing persons. Here, he appropriates the visual imagery of missing people by photographing missing person flyers, often spotted in nearby public spaces. He paradoxically stresses the uncertainty while manifesting the image of the lost person through a second representation. It is an archival impulse that reveals an interest in memory, loss and personal narratives. Zhang Enli (1965) For Zhang, painting is a process that stems from his own memories and the complicated experiences of aging. In his works, Zhang takes familiar objects and forces us to look at them again, like revisiting an old photo album. His brushstrokes are slightly exaggerated and cartoonish, yet they seem reminiscent of a classical Chinese style. The objects in Zhang’s paintings he finds inspiration for in many different places, such as
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