Chinese, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active in France since 1970.
Born 1948, in China.
Sculptor, installation artist.
After living in Hong Kong from 1962 to 1970, Chan moved to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. He has taken part in many Salons and group exhibitions in Paris, notably the Salon de Mai, the Salon de Jeune Sculpture, and the MAC ...
(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....
Japanese, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active in the USA.
Born 1955.
Assemblage sculptor.
Kenji Fujita constructs monumental assemblages out of various objects, which, while remaining abstract, still refer to reality.
New York, 2 May 1991: Elephant’s Ear (1988, mural sculpture, acrylic on wood, galvanised tin, moulded plastic and rubber piping...
Chinese, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1962, in Beijing.
Painter, sculptor, mixed-media installation artist, animation artist.
Gu Dexin is a self-taught artist and co-founder of the New Mark Group (later became the Analysis Group) in the late 1980s. This group, working collaboratively, is more interested in questioning the importance of concepts, language, and authorship, such as ...
(b Harbin, 1957).
Chinese painter, sculptor, and installation artist. Wang Guangyi’s formal education was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution during his teenage years. Afterwards, he attended the China Academy of Art (Zhejiang) and graduated in 1984 with a degree in oil painting.
In the wake of the avant-garde art movement in China in the 1980s, Wang became part of the Northern Art Group and produced a series of paintings whose subjects reflected skepticism towards the philosophies and themes of classical art in the West. The series used a cold, gray palette to illustrate frozen and barren Nordic settings consciously removed from emotion, revealing Wang’s distrust of passion and his faith in reason and rationality at the time, a distrust that was an antidote to the cultic zeal towards Mao and the ideals of revolution in the preceding years.
Wang’s groundbreaking series of Mao portraits in 1988 were a continuation of the conscious move away from emotional manipulation and viewer identification. In these portraits, Wang superimposed a grid over Mao. The grid served as a barrier between the adorer and the object of adoration, drawing attention to the print material of the image, and highlighting Mao as an object of common household use. If in previous decades Mao’s portraits had been used as an icon for fervent adoration and incentive for socialist construction, here in Wang’s paintings the Mao portraits were candidly presented as ready-made and found objects. However, these appropriated Mao pictures were quite ambivalent in meaning. To Wang, they were not an indictment against socialism or Mao, but rather a reaffirmation of the Dadaist spirit of the Cultural Revolution....
Japanese, 20th – 21st century, female.
Born 14 March 1953, in Kurume (Fukuoka).
Sculptor, installation artist.
After studying at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Hirakawa Shigeko was awarded a scholarship by the French government. She settled in Paris in 1983, where she studied at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Olivier Debré’s studio ...
Korean, 20th – 21st century, female.
Active in the USA.
Born 1957, in Taegu.
Installation artist, sculptor, performance artist, video artist.
Kim Soo-ja settled in New York. She uses Korean cloth in her work, which she folds, crumples or hangs; for her the fabric has symbolic weight, one tied to the culture of her country. The cloth becomes a metaphorical relation with her body. Rolled in a bundle to form a ...
Korean, 20th – 21st century, female.
Born 1964, in Yongwol.
Sculptor, installation artist, performance artist, draughtswoman.
Lee Bul graduated from Hong-Ik University in Seoul with a bachelor of fine arts in sculpture. She settled in Seoul. Lee seeks to explore feminine archetypes by creating a universe inhabited by monsters and imaginary creatures based on Korean legends and contemporary technology (notably cyborgs), or manga imagery. She has also used her own nude body in her performances. Whether making unliveable, solitary cubicles - as in her karaoke pods - or strolling about in one or other of her outlandish costumes, she tries to destabilise established values through her objects and creatures. For instance, in her sculpture ...
Chinese, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1957, in Guangzhou.
Installation artist, sculptor.
Liang Juhui teaches at Guangzhou art academy. He belongs to the
(b Tokyo, Jan 16, 1957).
Japanese sculptor and installation artist. He finished undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1986 and came to prominence in the late 1980s with installations of digital counters in the form of light-emitting diodes. He made his first counter in 1988 and subsequently retained this form as his basic building block: a large, two-digit red display, it continually counts from 1 to 99, never reaching 100 or registering zero. Often he wired together several counters together so that they triggered each other at various points; he called these groups ‘Regions’ and saw them as representing a symbolic universe. In the first half of the 1990s he produced work as part of his 133651 series: ranging from small groupings of counters to large, complex installations, each work consisted of a row of ten two-digit counters with up to five wired together. Such a unit allows a total of 133,651 combinations to appear, hence the title. The project ...
Japanese, 20th – 21st century, female.
Active in New York.
Born 1967, in Tokyo.
Sculptor, photographer, video artist.
Mariko Mori first studied fashion design in Japan before working as a model during the late 1980s. She then went on to study in London at the Byam Shaw School of Art and Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. In ...
(b Tokyo, Feb 21, 1967).
Japanese photographer, video artist, performance artist, sculptor, installation artist and painter. Mori studied fashion at the Bunka Fashion Institute in Tokyo from 1986 to 1988 and worked part-time as a model before moving to London to study at the Shaw School of Art (1988–9) and the Chelsea College of Art (1989–92), where she earned a BFA. In New York she participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1992–3). In 1994 Mori returned to Tokyo and began making large digital photographs and videos in which she appears as a ‘shaman, mermaid, cyber-geisha and visitor from the future’ (Johnson, p. 56). Subsequently, she assembled teams of stylists, photographers, computer imagists, sound technicians and fabricators along with musicians and scientists to create immersive multimedia installations consisting of digital photography, music, video, cinematic spatial effects, abstract biomorphic sculptural forms, paintings and scent, engaging users and responding to data and environmental stimuli. She exhibited her art in biennale exhibitions throughout the world, for example, in Singapore, Venice, Shanghai, Sydney, Kwangju, Istanbul and Lyon. From ...
(b Hyogo Prefecture, 1945).
Japanese photographer, sculptor, and conceptual artist. He studied at Kyoto City University of Fine Arts, where he earned a BFA in 1967 and an MFA in 1969. Nomura was initially trained as a sculptor. In his MFA thesis project, Tardiology (1969), Nomura explored the idea of non-permanent sculptural form, creating an eight-metre tall cardboard sculpture and then using photographs to record the changes in form as the boxes gradually collapsed under their own weight. From that point on photography was one of his primary media. Nomura was interested in investigating processes of scientific and natural phenomena with a particular focus on the passage of time. He used photographs to capture movement and changes over time and to make previously unseen things visible. Many of his projects were created over lengthy periods, with photographs being taken daily or monthly and for years. In his 1991 Analemma series (The Analemma ’91-Noon...
The final decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century witnessed an increasing propensity for artists to incorporate aspects of science in their own art. In many fields of scientific research—including the cloning of mammals, the genetic modification of crops, the creation of bioengineered organs and tissues, advances in nanotechnology and robotics, experimental research in how the human mind works and the study of artificial intelligence—the frontiers of knowledge pushed outward at an accelerated pace. In the spirit of creative inquiry, or in order to critique the goals and outcomes of scientific experimentation and application, artists regularly borrowed subjects, tools and approaches from science as a means to the production of art ( see fig. ).
In documenting and assessing the achievements of visual artists engaged with science, there was no broad consensus on the categorisation of artists’ work across the full range of activities, methods, motivations and use of materials. Assessments of artistic practice focused on artists’ work categorised by the traditional fields of science (e.g. artists who explore biology, artists who explore physical sciences). Other analyses of artistic practice focused on categories of art media (e.g. artists who use traditional means such as carving and casting to represent scientific discoveries, artists who explore and employ biological materials and scientific instruments)....
Chinese, 20th – 21st century, female.
Active in Paris since 1990.
Born 1959, in Xianjou.
Sculptor, installation artist.
Shen Yuan settled in Paris in 1990. She explores the limitations of being a woman, in both Chinese and Western society, and the potential power of the female body. In ...
(b Shizuoka, March 3, 1965).
Japanese conceptual artist, sculptor and installation artist . Sone earned an MA in architecture at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (1992), but decided to experiment with a wider range of media in order to explore the concepts of futility and the unattainable. His first work, Her 19th Foot (1993), shown at the Art Tower, in Mito, and later in the Rooseum, in Malmö, consisted of 19 unicycles welded together for 19 cyclists to ride. As several attempts by different participants failed, the work implied the ‘impossibility of communal illusions’ (see Inoue). His next work, Artificial Lawn Performance (1994), consisted of four photographs that seemed to prove the fiction that Sone had laid Astroturf on the surface of the moon as part of NASA’s art programme. The nonsense of the grandiose act is heightened by the artificial quality evident in Sone’s pseudo-documentary photographs. For the opening of the Expo ...
(b Fuefuki, Yamanashi Prefecture, Jan 2, 1969).
Japanese sculptor and installation artist. A Tokyo-based graphic-design graduate of Tama Art University, Tokyo (1992), Suda briefly worked in the design field. Exposed to wood-carving in art school, he began to use both traditional Japanese techniques and those of his own devising and to present his work in unconventional installations.
Suda replicated and interpreted flowers and other plants in fine-grained magnolia wood through realistic, life-size carving and painting. The artist, raised in the countryside, came to this subject after moving to the mega-metropolis of Tokyo. He favoured familiar plants and also selected motifs according to the flora around museum venues. The magnolia – in the form of a blossom, bud, seed pod, twig, or leaf – was a frequent motif and was featured in exhibitions at D’Amelio Terras Gallery (2000) and the Asia Society (2010) in New York City and at the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu (...
Japanese, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active in France.
Born 1946, in Fukuoka.
Sculptor, assemblage artist, draughtsman.
Op Art.
Sunagawa Haruhiko studied physics at the University of Tokyo before studying drawing and painting at the Hammersmith College of Arts in London in 1973. He lives and works in Paris. His structures appear light, for the solidity of stone and wood is juxtaposed with the fragility of glass. His rigid geometric forms are softened by the effects of moving light....
(b Yaoundé, 1967).
Cameroonian sculptor, draughtsman, and installation artist. Self-taught, his work gained international recognition in the 1990s, when he exhibited in Belgium, Germany, and Japan. Honours include his selection for the 1994 Biennale of Kwangu, South Korea, a solo exhibit at the 1996 Dakar Biennale des Artes, his selection for the 1998 Johannesburg Biennale and the 2000 Lyon Biennale. He uses discarded materials to comment on the conditions of the world, devoting his work of the late 1990s to the topic of AIDS. In conjuction with the Doual’Art Association, he collaborated with several AIDS patients to express their experiences. These emotional works often include razor blades, syringes, condoms, and nails to evoke themes of death and issues of the body. His installations also incorporated linear drawings that convey a frantic dynamism and depict a chaotic world. For Tayou, art is part of everyday life, not a separate institution, and his methods and materials emphasize his commitment to the world around him. He claims not to be an artist in order to address the artificial separation between artists and other people. Through his work he aims to reveal what people are always trying to hide....
(b Tokyo, April 5, 1967).
Japanese sculptor, installation and video artist . Torimitsu received a BFA in sculpture at Tama Art University (1994) and, soon after her university graduation, she completed Miyata Jiro, a life-size robot of a stereotypical Japanese businessman, and made it crawl on the pavements of various districts in Tokyo. Perhaps because of its candid critique of Japanese corporate culture, businessmen in Marunouchi district pretended not to look at the robot, while it attracted large crowds elsewhere. In order to study varying reactions to her robot in different social settings, Torimitsu moved to New York in 1996, to participate in the P.S.1 International Program. For the American premier of Miyata Jiro that year, on Wall Street and near the Rockefeller Center, Torimitsu dressed as a nurse to redirect the robot’s movement or recharge its battery. Her New York performances were so well received that Torimitsu subsequently acquired opportunities to do the same in Amsterdam, Graz, London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Sydney....
