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Article

Cao Fei  

Chinese, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 1978, in Guangzhou, China.

Photographer, performance artist. Video, multimedia.

Cao Fei graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2001, having attended middle school at the same institution four years earlier. She was a co-founder of the partnership Ou Ning + Cao Fei. Her early photography and subsequent interactive sound and video-game environments, or ‘machinima’, emerged from her initial interest in commercial advertising and electronic entertainment videos. Her works often blur reality by involving virtual cosplay figures who imitate manga superhero figures, often artist friends or youths. These performances take place in the urban environment and engage the art world with virtual economies, as well as linking to the rapid modernization and consumerism emerging within China since the turn of the century. She has become known for her ongoing experimental, animated, ethnographic documentary that engages the online world of Second Life to create the virtual RMB City. The video was first shown at the Venice Biennale (China Tracy Pavilion, ...

Article

Chan, Suki  

British-Chinese, 20th – 21st century, female.

Active in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom.

Born 1977, in Hong Kong.

Installation artist, film-maker. Multimedia, video.

Suki Chan spent her early childhood in Hong Kong’s rural district of the New Territories, before emigrating with her family to Oxford, England, at the age of six. Despite the difficulties of adjusting to a second language and culture and having at times a sense of displacement, she went on to study at London’s Goldsmiths’ College, from which she graduated in ...

Article

Chang, Patty  

Aileen June Wang

(b San Leandro, CA, Feb 3, 1972).

American performance and video artist of Chinese ancestry. Chang earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1994. She showed her first solo exhibition at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, in 1999. Her body of work focused on how people can be deceived, either through sight—what one sees is not necessarily true—or through mainstream assumptions about such topics as Asia, sexuality, and socially accepted behavior. Chang attributed her past stint in a cybersex company as the catalyst for exploring illusion as a theme. She realized that video flattened three-dimensional, live performances into a stream of two-dimensional images, enabling her to engage in visual deception.

Most of Chang’s early works investigated problems of gender and sexuality, using her own body and elements suggesting violence or transgression. The photograph Fountain (1999) depicted her inside a cubicle of a public lavatory, with a urinal visible on the far wall. Wearing a business suit, she knelt on hands and knees, seemingly kissing herself but actually slurping water off a mirror on the floor. The accompanying video focused on Chang’s face and her passionate interaction with her own reflection. While the photograph suggested female humiliation in a male world, the video complicated matters by implying that the act was motivated by narcissism....

Article

Chin, Mel  

Mary M. Tinti

(b Houston, TX, 1951).

American sculptor, installation and conceptual artist. His multimedia works investigate the pathology of contemporary culture. Mel Chin was born and raised in Houston, Texas to parents of Chinese birth and received his BA in 1975 from the Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee. The works in Chin’s oeuvre are diverse in both medium and subject, but a consistent undercurrent of social, political, and environmental responsibility runs throughout. Whether a sculpture, film, video game, installation, public project or earthwork, Chin’s artworks consistently targeted a broad spectrum of pressing cultural and ecological interests and spread their message in subtle, if not viral ways.

In the 1980s, Chin produced a number of sculptures that set the stage for his ever-evocative artistic journey. The Extraction of Plenty from What Remains: 1823 (1988–9) is a frequently referenced piece from this period. It is a symbolic encapsulation of the effects of the Monroe Doctrine, referencing the complicated dealings between the US (represented by truncated replicas of White House columns) and Central America (represented by a cornucopia of mahogany branches, woven banana-tree fiber, and a surface layer of hardened blood, mud, and coffee grinds). From the 1990s, however, Chin moved away from strictly gallery-based installations and began creating works that directly engaged contemporary culture in a variety of physical and theoretical landscapes....

Article

Feng Mengbo  

Chinese, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1966, in Beijing.

Multimedia installation artist, painter, designer of interactive games.

After graduating from the printmaking depart­ment of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (1991), Feng Mengbo embarked on a career that has combined the visual lexicon and technical functionality of interactive computer gaming with references to popular culture, Chinese history, and Chinese artistic traditions. Feng is regarded as a pioneer of new-media art in China: his corpus includes interactive CD-ROMs, single-player interactive games with traditional controllers or dance pads, and paintings. Feng’s early set of oil paintings ...

Article

Yang Fudong  

Britta Erickson

(b Beijing, Oct 7, 1971).

Chinese photographer, video artist and film maker . He studied in the oil painting department of the China Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou from 1991 until graduation in 1995. In 1993, for his performance piece Elsewhere, he did not speak for three months. Returning to live in Beijing (1995–7), he studied film for two weeks at the Beijing Film School (1996), and wrote his first film script for An Estranged Paradise (filmed 1997; completed 2002). In 1998 he moved to Shanghai, and began participating in exhibitions in 1999.

The mises-en-scène and careful compositions of Yang’s photographs exhibit the influence of his rigorous education as an oil painter. Lighting and colour—or the lack thereof—contribute significantly to the tenor of each work. Yang’s ability to control the framing, not just of photographic images but also of moving images, in his videos and films sets him apart from other Chinese video artists....

Article

Furuhashi, Teiji  

Japanese, 20th century, male.

Born 1960; died 29 October 1995, in Kyoto, of an AIDS-related illness.

Installation artist, video artist. Multimedia.

Dumb Type Collective.

Teiji Furuhashi was the founder of the performance group Dumb Type, an internationally-recognized, Kyoto-based arts collective whose members started to work together in ...

Article

Hibino, Katsuhito  

Japanese, 20th century, male.

Painter, decorative artist, installation artist, performance artist. Multimedia.

Hibino Katsuhito graduated from the design division of the fine arts department of Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music in 1982. He takes part in group exhibitions. He took part in the Sixth Sydney Biennial, and exhibited his work in a one-man show at Hajuku, Japan, in ...

Article

Ho Siu Kee  

Chinese, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1964, in Hong Kong.

Performance artist. Mixed media, multimedia.

Ho Siu Kee received a B.A. in Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1989), an M.F.A. in Sculpture from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan (1995), and a Ph.D. in Fine Art from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia (2003). At the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Ho worked closely with Cheung Yee (born 1936), a sculptor well known for his cast paper murals and geometric forms reminiscent of traditional Chinese pictograms and motifs.

Ho is especially interested in the interaction of the human body with space. This has led him to devise a number of gadgets that have the appearance of prosthetic objects. These objects are intended to destabilize the body by placing it in situations that are beyond the normal ambit of the human body. For instance, in ...

Article

Ikeda, Ryoji  

Rachel K. Ward

(b Gifu, 1966).

Japanese electronic composer and sound artist, active also in France. He is best known for composing reductionist sounds of extreme frequencies, employing sine waves, electronic sounds, and white noise; these are often presented as ambient soundscapes in immersive installations made of light and/or projected visualizations of data. Ikeda originally trained in Japan as an economist. He began composing music in the 1990s, focusing on Minimalism with a curiosity for the duality of mathematics, specifically the binary patterns of 0s and 1s of digital software. His compositions continued the investigations of John Cage and Morton Feldman in exploring the potential differences between tones. Ikeda’s initial albums were +/- (1996) and 0°C (1998), which resonated with the glitch electronic scene emerging at that time. In 2000 Ikeda’s album Matrix, on the Touch label, attracted considerable attention as an interactive electronic work. Ikeda presented ten 5-minute long tones affected by the listener’s proximity. These were followed by a second series of tones made from orchestral instruments to produce overlapping sounds. The album explored time and tone and generated a wider discussion in the music industry about the relationship between sound and new media formats. Ikeda later produced the albums ...

Article

Iwai, Toshio  

Japanese, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1962, in Kira, Aichi Prefecture.

Installation artist. Multimedia.

Iwai held a solo exhibition in 1997 to inaugurate the new intercommunication centre in Tokyo, intended to present the culture of electronic information in its relationship to art, culture, technology and science. There he presented ...

Article

Koo Jeong-A  

Hyewon Lee

(b Seoul, Mar 13, 1967).

Korean multimedia artist active in Europe and the USA. Koo studied Western painting at Hongik University, Seoul (1985–1990), and multimedia art at the Ecole National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1991–1997). While Koo’s drawings and photographs capture inconspicuous details of her daily life and surroundings, her installations incorporate such mundane objects as coins, rubber bands, sugar cubes, empty bottles, washing sponges, and Walt Disney cartoon characters. Her interest in the fragments of everyday life not only reflects a sustained cultural interest in the everyday (le quotidien) in France, but it is also in tune with many Korean artists of her generation, who rose to significance in the Korean art world in the late 1990s, turning to small items of daily use rather than pursuing excessive visibility or the monumentality evident in the works of their predecessors.

More often than not, nestled down at insignificant corners of an exhibition space, Koo’s small-scale installations evade a viewer’s eyes at first glance. Sometimes an installation is even invisible, as in one of her two installations for the ...

Article

Joo, Michael  

Michelle Yun

(b Ithaca, NY, 1966).

American multimedia artist. A second generation Korean–American, Joo grew up in Minneapolis, MN, and studied briefly at Wesleyan University as a biology major. He took a two-year sabbatical to work at a seed science firm in Austria and subsequently received his BFA from Washington University, St. Louis, MO. In 1989, Joo went on to receive an MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art, in New Haven, CT, in 1991, after which he moved to New York.

Joo’s diverse body of work includes sculpture, video, installations and works on paper that deal with issues relating to cultural identity, the body and the relationship between science and art. His projects overlap thematically and formally as part of an ongoing series. Joo has variously implemented a wide range of materials, including monosodium glutamate, salt, taxidermy animals and even his own body, to explore the transformative moment that signals a change of state between matter and energy. Through this exchange, Joo seeks to illuminate the slippages in meaning of the subject within a prescribed cultural context. Time often functions as a cyclical and multilayered catalyst for transformation, exemplified best through his video installations such as ...

Article

Kaino, Glenn  

Michelle Yun

(Akira)

(b Los Angeles, CA, 1972).

Fourth generation Japanese–American multimedia artist. Kaino received a BA from the University of California, Irvine, in 1993 and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, in 1996. He was a co-founder with Daniel J. Martinez and Tracey Shiffman of the former Los Angeles artist-run non-profit exhibition space Deep River (1997–2002). In addition to his artistic practice, Kaino ran a web design company during the late 1990s and was formerly chief creative officer of Napster. He also co-founded Uber.com, an online multimedia site that operated from 2006 to 2008.

Kaino’s sculptures, media works and site-specific installations reference, recycle and sample tropes from popular culture to challenge hegemonic narratives. Influenced by the work of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, Kaino looked to their example to develop projects that transmute cultural identity by re-contextualizing its production and exposing imbalances and inconsistencies in its structure. This concept is exemplified through the kinetic sculpture ...

Article

Kawaguchi, Tatsuo  

Japanese, 20th century, male.

Born 1940, in Kobe.

Painter, sculptor of assemblages. Multimedia.

Conceptual Art.

Kawaguchi studied at the Tama School of Fine Art in Tokyo, graduating in 1962. He teaches at the University of Akashi. Kawaguchi’s interest in conceptual art appeared early in his career. Since then, he has used the new media of light, video, photography and film. He creates assemblages of markers arranged in a space, some of which can be electronically stimulated. Interested in making his art available outside normal gallery and museum spaces, he has produced two works for Japanese high schools: ...

Article

Kawara, On  

Japanese, 20th century, male.

Active in the USA fromc.1962.

Born 1933, in Kariya (Aichi); died late June 2014, in New York City.

Painter, collage artist. Multimedia.

Conceptual Art, Mail Art.

Kawara is a self-taught artist. After painting his early works in Japan, he emigrated to the USA in the early 1960s. His first works from the 1950s express a desire to exploit the grotesque, as in the swollen female torsoes surrounded by scattered, apparently floating limbs of the ...

Article

Kinoshita, Suchan  

Japanese, 20th – 21st century, female.

Active in the Netherlands.

Born 1960, in Tokyo.

Installation artist. Animated films, multimedia.

Kinoshita studied music at the Musik­hochschule in Cologne, Germany, from 1981 to 1984, and experimental theatre at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, The Netherlands, from 1988 to 1990...

Article

Lee, Bing  

Margo Machida

(b Guangzhou, China, Sept 15, 1948).

Chinese multimedia artist. Raised in Hong Kong and Macau, Lee immigrated to the United States in 1973 to attend the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio (BFA 1977), followed by graduate studies at Syracuse University (1977–9). Moving to New York City in 1979, he became actively involved with the burgeoning downtown Manhattan arts community, where he created Graffiti and poster art, as well as outdoor slide theater works. Beginning in the 1980s, Lee co-founded three New York-based arts collectives: Epoxy Art Group (1981–7), Godzilla: Asian American Art Network (1990–2001) and Tomato Grey (2009). The first, Epoxy Art Group, involved project-oriented collaborations with artists from mainland China, Canada and Hong Kong that reflected their intersecting standpoints as Chinese living in the West. Godzilla: Asian American Art Network was a pan-Asian, intergenerational art group. Most recently, with Tomato Grey, Lee became involved with a new cohort of contemporary immigrant artists who endeavor to foster cultural exchange between arts practitioners in Hong Kong and New York City. Lee was a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts in New York (...

Article

Leung, Simon  

Chinese-American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in the United States.

Born 1964, in Hong Kong.

Multimedia artist, curator, activist, writer.

Simon Leung immigrated to northern California from Hong Kong in 1974. He went on to study at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in 1987 graduated with a B.A. magna cum laude. In 1988–1989, Leung participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program.

Leung is a professor of studio art at the University of California, Irvine. Leung’s work engages aesthetic form through socio-psychological and ethical practices, which mainly deal with issues of sexuality, border crossings, territories, and the ‘cosmopolitan nomad’; his long-term interest in displacement and desertion was expressed through filming the daily life of Warren Niesluchowski, a Polish immigrant to the United States. Since the early 1990s he has worked on a series of projects that consider the performative gesture of the squatting body, as a gesture of both occupation and resistance. Another topic that he has explored is the surfing communities in southern California and the lives of Vietnamese refugees who settled in the same area; this work formed part of a trilogy about the ‘residual space of the Vietnam War’. In ...

Article

Feng Mengbo  

Britta Erickson

(b Beijing, Jan 9, 1966).

Chinese installation artist, painter and computer artist. He completed middle school in 1985 at the Beijing School of Arts and Crafts, and received his BA in 1991 from the printmaking department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. He is considered China’s first and most important computer artist. He is a guest teacher at the Central Academy’s Photography and Digital Media Studio.

Beginning in 1983 or 1984, Feng became fascinated by computer gaming. He made use of the look and techniques of computer games and explored the implications of computer gaming through his work. Several early 1990s painting series reproduce the look of computer games of the time, with two-dimensional fighting depicted in front of simple backgrounds rendered in flat colours. Game Over: Long March (1994; set of 42 paintings), for example, deploys such popular culture heroes as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in battle along with Tyrannosaurus rexes, People’s Liberation Army soldiers and Mao Zedong. As a result of these painting series, Feng was considered a Political Pop artist, Political Pop being a late 1980s–early 1990s painting trend that defused Cultural Revolution (...