“My interest in themes of mimicry, doubling, or mirroring, both conceptually and aesthetically, could be related to my identity as a queer South Asian person who is also part of a marginalized caste. But it also speaks to a broader split or rupture that all individuals face, a doubling that we all need to contend with at some point. Growing up queer, you need to know when to reveal and conceal certain aspects of yourself, to split off your inner desire from the outside of your body.”
Aman Aheer
“I lived in a village in Hubei during the early 2000s, where the living environment was very rugged, with yellow muddy grounds and garbage dumps. I often went to the wooded areas by the river, using wooden sticks I found to sketch images, both real and imagined, on the muddy ground. I would also sometimes take my aunt's scythe to carve patterns on trees, and in the roadside grass, I would find rags and homework books discarded by older children, which I used for my artwork. However, the shape and form of materials like rags were beyond my control.”
Zhang Shijie
“From altar paintings to portraits of dignitaries, images have always had the mission of recording, disseminating and persuading, and these missions were quickly transferred after the invention of photography, and became more secretive and unstoppable. It can be said that the way to view images is like the access rules set by the powerful - you must watch in a certain way, otherwise your viewing is invalid. I am a little scared of this kind of commonplace viewing.”
Hu Chenyu
Kentaro Okumura
“For me it is about the desire to see things and express things as well as I can, with a sense of aliveness through feeling. In a broader sense, I think about the desire to live and how painting is able to talk about that. With that, I’m particularly interested in the relationship between painting and the spirit; how a painting can both consciously and unconsciously reflect, express and can influence our inner sense of perception and worldview.”
“I aimed to achieve a sense of "simulation" while maintaining an element of "falsity." As I hand-wove these faux grasses (colored nylon zip ties), I often found myself muttering, "This is too real" and "This is too fake." The seemingly monotonous and repetitive process, though at times futile, evoked strong emotions within me.”
Wei Sansan
Georgia Brady-Tompt
“I like maps, I like the idea of mapping space. Im fascinated with how people build and live in cities, how we construct and how we document. For me, the map is diagrammatically archiving a landscape. I like to think my sculptures achieve the same thing. I use materials from both industrial or domestic scenes, some recognizable like skirting board or architrave. I like to think the sculptures are digesting architecture.”
Willy Nabi
“Considering myself as the first person viewer, might sound obvious but it isn’t something I was in the habit of doing, I didn’t think of a viewer, I came from a place of being obsessed with improvisation and the desire to reconcile the feeling one gets when drawing with painting, I wanted to be able to treat the blank canvas like a piece of paper. Throwaway. It was all intuition and feeling, the outcome didn’t matter.”