Japanese, 20th–21st century, male.
Born 1947.
Sculptor.
At the end of the 1980s, Yasuhiko Ando spent a long time in Stuttgart, Germany. During this same period he exhibited in Paris at the Salon Grands et Jeunes d’Aujourd’hui. His sculptures follow a horizontal plan, mingling abstract or metaphorical elements with precise representations, such as figures....
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 ...
Chinese, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1962, in Zhejiang.
Painter, sculptor. Nudes.
Chen Wanshan began by studying sculpture at the National Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1985, and then took up painting. He teaches at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Both his sculptures and his paintings have appeared in many exhibitions in China and in ...
Chinese, 20th–21st century, male.
Born 1953.
Painter, sculptor. Portraits, still-lifes, landscapes.
or Zheng Zaidong
Cheng Tsai-tung trained in journalism before switching to painting. While technically fairly rudimentary, his work proceeds from a synthetic vision that he renders in large flat areas.
1984–1985, Taiwan New Painting...
(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.
Born 1950.
Sculptor.
Arte Povera.
Endo Toshikatsu works in wood, coal tar, earth, fire and water. He has taken part in numerous group exhibitions since 1974, mainly in Japan. Other exhibitions were: 1986, Documenta VIII, Kassel; 1987, New York; 1988...
Chinese, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1949, in Shanghai.
Sculptor.
Ming Fay was from an artistic family. He began his studies in Hong Kong in 1961 and went on to continue in the USA, studying design at Ohio State University, Columbus, and sculpture at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the Kansas Institute of Art. After briefly returning to Hong Kong, he finally settled in New York. Since ...
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...
(b Morioka City, Iwate Prefecture, May 25, 1951).
Japanese sculptor. He studied at Tokyo University of Art and Design (1971–5) and Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (1975–7). In 1986 he was awarded a one-year scholarship, from the Bureau of Cultural Properties, to live and work in London. He represented Japan at the 1988 Venice Biennale. Funakoshi’s figurative wooden sculptures refer to both Japanese and European carving techniques and iconography. He began using camphor wood in 1977 chiefly for its organic associations, warmth and colouring, which he likened to Japanese skin pigmentation. His elongated bust-length figures, cut off beneath the elbows and navel, as well as full-length standing figures, have an atmosphere of expressionless restraint. He once described their metaphoric function in the following terms: ‘If I am able to see the world clearly by looking within myself, then I can make a statement concerning human existence through the depiction of a single person’ (exh. cat. ...
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, male.
Active in France.
Born 1949, in Niigata.
Sculptor, painter, draughtsman, pastellist. Monuments, low reliefs.
After training at Tamabi Art School in Tokyo from 1968 to 1972, Harada Tetsuo went to Paris and continued his training at the École des beaux-arts. He went on to teach at the École d’Architecture in Versailles, working at Fresnay-l’Évêque, near Chartres, and living in Paris. Harada makes monumental sculpture in granite and marble on the themes of nature and water. He often cuts his own stone to make flat sculptures in which the forms are drawn in either horizontally, along the ground, or vertically. In ...
Japanese, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1946, in Kagawa Prefecture.
Sculptor, painter, draughtsman, engraver.
Haraguchi Noriyuki studied at Nihon University until 1970. His style can be described as Pop Art and he mainly uses heavy materials such as concrete, steel, copper and tar. Work by him was shown at the following: the seventh Exhibition of Contemporary Japanese Art (...
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 ...
Chinese, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1956, in Hong Kong.
Educator, curator, writer, sculptor, painter.
Ho received a B.F.A. from the University of Saskatchewan in 1980 and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis, in 1983. After returning to Hong Kong, Ho was the exhibition director of the Hong Kong Arts Centre from 1998 to 2001. He also served as the founding director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, from 2004 to 2006. His curatorial projects include more than one hundred exhibitions, most notably the Asian section of the 96 Containers exhibition in Copenhagen in 1996; the second (1996) and third (1999) iterations of the Asia-Pacific Triennials of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia; and exhibitions at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, including Mobile Art Show (1988), Being Minorities: Contemporary Asian Art (1997), Museum 97: History, Community, Individual(1997), and ...
Chinese, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active in Shanghai.
Born 1949, in Shanghai.
Painter, sculptor. Figure compositions.
Huang Yinghao studied sculpture at the fine arts academy of Zhejiang in 1966. From 1969 to 1981 he did artwork for various magazines in Shanghai. In 1982 he returned to his studies, this time to the painting section of Jiaotong University in Shanghai. He exhibits both in China and abroad....
Japanese, 20th – 21st century, female.
Active in Germany.
Born 1951.
Painter, sculptor, draughtswoman, watercolourist. Figures.
Symbolism.
Leiko Ikemura lives in Cologne and Berlin, where she teaches painting at the Hochschule der Künste. She started to become known in the 1980s, notably in Switzerland. Her style, related to the new Expressionism of the beginning of the 1980s, has veered towards Symbolism. The central figures of her mythology are a little girl and a cat, and her magical universe is bathed in metamorphoses between the animal, vegetable and human kingdoms. She shows her works in solo exhibitions, including ...
Japanese, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1948.
Sculptor.
Kato studied at the university of Iwate Prefecture. His works are conceptual in approach, made in stone set with metal. In 1973 he received the prize at the 5th Exhibition of Contemporary Sculpture in Ube. In 1974...
Japanese, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1947, in Hyogo Prefecture.
Sculptor.
Kenretsu studied architecture before turning to sculpture. In 1970 he was awarded the President’s Prize at the 5th JAFA (Japan Art Festival Association) exhibition.
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 ...
