Sculptor, performer, photographer, architect, curator and blogger, he is known internationally for his provocative and political art. He is an opposition figure to the Chinese government and an emblem of freedom of expression in China, openly criticizing the Chinese government’s position on democracy and human rights. Ai was among the first generation of students to study abroad following China’s reform in 1980, and lived in the United States from 1981 to 1993, attending the Arts Students League of New York, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley.

The nature in Jaewon Jung’s paintings encompasses not only nature, which grows on its own without human touch but also nature that has been changed and catered for human preferences and desires. To her, nature is not just an object of contemplation or nostalgia for the lost landscapes, but something that incorporates time, memories, desires, new environment, and experiences that transcend beyond the visible spectrum. Nature continues to change in the past and present, reflecting the relationship between individuals and society, nature and humans, and appears in the most ideal form of that era. As we go back and forth between what's real and what's ideal, we reflect on changes in our perception of nature and ask ourselves what is “true” landscape painting in this era. Beyond realistic and illusory descriptions, she is trying to reproduce nature more sensibly.

Alum Lee uses patterns commonly found in the fashion industry, such as dots, stripes, and checks, to move between flatness and illusion, distorting the screen, and revealing flatness through pictorial traces. Through this, she evokes latent data about space, deconstructing and recombining them once again, overlapping layers to produce complex processes of work.

Abdessemed is a conceptual artist who works in a range of media including drawing, video, photography, performance, and sculpture, and collaborates with creators from many fields, from poetry to dance and architecture. He manipulates familiar materials and images to create provocative and often violent works influenced by his exposure to the Gulf War and its global impact. Drawing on personal, political, and historical narratives, the artist believes that his art “is a confrontation that leads to a break with the norm and is accompanied by extreme anger,” but that his work is simultaneously  “…actually positive. The world is violent – not me".
Abdessemed’s work has been presented at four Venice Biennales (2003, 2007, 2011, 2015), where he received the Benesse Prize in 2007.  He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at major institutions including the Centre Georges Pompidou, the San Francisco Art Institute, MoMA PS1, and the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Geneva. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Musée national d’art moderne Georges-Pompidou, Paris, the Collection Budi Tek, Shanghai, and the Fondation François Pinault, Venice, among others.

Through photoscollected via the web, Kim's work embodies the imagined nature and conveys it as though it had been experienced in real life. While traditionalartworks convey nature seen through sight as seen while painting, Kim captures the essence of the asynchronous image seized throughphotography. The "On the waves." series expresses the location and moment where fiction and reality collide by overlapping the seasons andweather experienced on an anonymous beach and in real life. With shards of senses colliding and combining, these pieces try to aggregateeveryday life with remnants of incidental sensations. The imagined sense of movement is artistically articulated, recreated with a thin sense ofspace, and placed on a canvas based on digital photographs. It takes in the image from the monitor and applies a tiny bit of creativity to create awhole new visual world. The moment's image is caught and the invisible components are conveyed visually through the waves that carry theseason's colors. By contemplating and creating a virtual environment, Kim continues her search to find a distinct depth amid the priceless andsuperficial details of precise pieces. By doing this, she emphasizes leaving sensory imprints and communicating beyond the confines of realityand fantasy.

Turakella Gyindo (Tura) is a Tanzanian multidisciplinary artist and curator based in Dar es Salaam, whose practice spans painting, installation, and live performance. Inspired by human nature and its adaptation to a rapidly changing world, she explores themes of intersectionality, identity, and belonging — envisioning a sense of self that extends beyond rigid social categories. Since completing the Curatorial Practice and Art Management programme at Nafasi Art Space Academy in 2021, she has curated and presented work across exhibitions and residencies in Tanzania, including at Alliance Française and the Goethe-Institut Dar es Salaam.

Genteki Yamashita was born in 1998 in Kanagawa Prefecture. He graduated from BA Oil Painting at Tama Art University. Yamashita explores the possibilities of diverse materials such as charcoal, crayon, oil and waste wood from everyday objects in his paintings, drawings and sculptures. By drawing lines and surfaces as if in direct contact with the screen, the distance from the screen and the physicality of the act of drawing remain on the screen. The medium that accumulates on the screen is like a pool of water that accumulates during a tour, and is formed as a work of art with unpredictable phenomena, instability, inevitability and coincidence in the production process. By wearing the accumulation of time through Yamashita’s handiwork, the work has a sense of weight, including an appearance and shape caused by artifice.


Embarking on his career in 1991 as a freelance sculpture artist, Pawarest Choksaen (Doe) (b.1970, Bangkok, Thailand) transitioned into the role of Art Director at an advertising agency in 1997. In 2019, he made the pivotal decision to resign from the advertising agency, embracing a full-time commitment to his passion as a fine artist.

In his artistic journey, Choksaen delves into the lives of those in his community, keenly observing their gestures, activities, and diverse perspectives. Through the expressive medium of acrylic paintings, his works become windows into the stories that unfold in the everyday lives of individuals within different contexts.

Maria Chang (b. 1981) is a contemporary artist who emphasises materiality through richly layered matière and vibrant, dynamic colour. She majored in Textile Art at Hongik University and creates relief-like, dimensional paintings using materials such as plaster, sand, and gel stone.

Henri Matisse was a French visual artist, known for both his use of color and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. The intense colorism of the works he painted between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves (French for "wild beasts"). Many of his finest works were created in the decade or so after 1906 when he developed a rigorous style that emphasized flattened forms and decorative patterns. In 1917, he relocated to a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, and the more relaxed style of his work during the 1920s gained him critical acclaim as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. After 1930, he adopted a bolder simplification of form. When ill health in his final years prevented him from painting, he created an important body of work in the medium of cut paper collage. His mastery of the expressive language of color and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.

Kittisak Thapkoa was born in 1989. He graduated from faculty of fine arts, Silpakorn University. He expresses the story in terms of realization and awareness of morality. Buddhism is the religion that teaches humans to be able to perceive the truth of the world. Humans cannot get away from birth, aging, suffering and death. 

He has participated in group exhibitions both in Thailand and abroad(USA). He even received the art awards from Toshiba “Brings good things to life” art competition in 2005, 2007 and 2011. The second award National arts by Bangkok bank and the winner of Bualuang 101 art contest in 2012. Moreover he is accepted from global collectors, Art state Singapore in 2016, Art state Jakarta in 2017, and Art expo Malaysia in 2018.

Ricardo Passaporte's work draws attention to the hand-drawn, homespun nature of their creation by
referencing Outsider Art and engaging with the repetitiveness and impulsivity of graffiti. The artist explores
the symbolic nature of found images and uses this material as inspiration to inform his practice. Passaporte
takes interest in and raises questions around the nature of making art, as well as the dichotomies between
the mass-produced and the uniquely singular art object.

SoYeong Kim reflects on urban life through photos taken in daily life, capturing fleeting moments that evoke a sense of both illusion and emptiness. Her work is characterized by creating illusionary scenes by adding painterly ambiguity to real landscapes. She paints by repeatedly layering vertical strokes of acrylic paint on traditional Korean paper (Jangji). The unique textures created from the combination of Jangji and acrylic form the depth and richness of her works. The warm texture of Jangji contrasts with the cold, artificial texture of acrylic, and through the brushstrokes, these elements merge to create a dualistic atmosphere in her compositions.

Peter Chey draws "faceless comfort" under a single idea—that comfort should reach anyone, easily. Working with the most familiar of materials, ballpoint pen and marker, he leaves each figure's face empty so that viewers can project their own stories and complete the work through their own reading. Moved by those who told him his small drawings brought them great comfort, he developed his "Giant Drawing" technique, enlarging tiny ballpoint sketches over a hundredfold and redrawing them by hand in the same medium. The result feels like a picture made by a giant standing steadfastly beside you—an image that shifts with distance, offering comfort through both scale and perception.

Matías Sánchez is a self taught artist currently living and working in Seville, Spain. Through his own exploration, the artist developed a signature style of vivid painterly surfaces as a backdrop against spirited characters and objects. His aesthetic and sometimes subject pays homage to Post-Impressionist artists such as Paul Gauguin. At times smoothly rendered, at times crudely abstract, the artist uses recurring images including sausages, bones, rats, people with menacing expressions, to form grotesque dreamscapes, exploding with energy.

Chansong Kim focuses on 'moment', the finding of fleeting emotions and insignificant experiences in our daily life. She majored in Fine Arts at Kookmin University and has continued to paint with a concentration on borders. She discovered that she was unfamiliar with a photograph in which only parts of her body were captured by mistake, and she studied the boundaries that separate her from what is outside of her body. In addition, she expressed the adaptation, conflict, and tension of a new existence in an unfamiliar place through the “Garden Series,” which was inspired by the narrative of Paris's free and beautiful gardens and plants during her 2015 year-long stay there. Chansong Kim, who is captivated by the uncertainty of painting, indicates the direction of future works, which she considers to be a balance between an interest in the subject's integrity and the material's physical properties.

LeeEu removes all figurative elements to focus on the materiality of the medium. The artist invites us to a sensitive and highly pictorial experience. We stroll through the fundamentals of painting: gesture, material, color. Sometimes the fleeting image of moss, of furrows dug by the wind. But soon, pure pictoriality takes over in the pleasure of colors and the overflow of elusive materials moved by an internal and mysterious movement. It was during her time as a fine arts major student at Hongik University (Seoul) from which she graduated in 1999, that she learned from the great masters of Dansaekhwa, a Korean non-figurative painting movement born in the 1970s. LeeEu’s love for the fine arts was cultivated and fostered through this experience and is still prominent in her work today. She arrived in France in 2003 and attended the school of decorative arts (École des Arts Décoratifs) in Strasbourg. In 2007, a diploma in hand, she entered a 16 months residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Having these new experiences, as well as encountering artistic movements such as Supports/Surfaces, allowed the artist to broaden her artistic horizons.

Alex Cho observes the subtle moments of mistranslations in his works. For him, these mistranslations are akin to off-pitch harmony or miscommunication that somehow makes sense. Information seems to overpower reality, appearing as translated or compressed surfaces. Amidst the current state of information overload, the artist seeks out gaps and errors that feel awkward. Using floaty drawing elements and a loose, painterly expression, the artist aims to react to and reassemble encountered information and events, creating new possibilities. The artist hopes to capture moments of awkwardness in these ambiguous spaces. His works resemble anti-humor jokes or awkward silences. The desire to go beyond information and drifting thoughts emerges on the surface of canvases as mistranslations, even if only superficially.

Anya Paintsil (b. 1993) is a London-based textile artist of Welsh and Ghanaian descent.
Combining traditional hand rug making techniques with Afro hair styling methods, Paintsil’s practice is largely autobiographical. She takes inspiration from her childhood, family stories, and Welsh and Ghanaian mythologies, while exploring identity and gendered labour. Paintsil seeks to promote artistic practices historically devalued due to their associations with femininity and other marginalised groups.

I Kyoung Ha begins with landscapes encountered in everyday life and on her travels, quietly drawing out the “traces of time and emotion” that remain in moments easy to overlook. Rather than rushing to define what she sees, she holds the scene in a sustained, contemplative gaze, then translates the subtle movements of the heart into paint. In her work, calmness takes precedence over drama; by withholding exaggerated emotional peaks, she allows a gentler resonance to surface—one that offers viewers a soft, lingering consolation.

What matters in her practice is less “what is depicted” than “how one stays with the scene.” Different affects—warmth and ease, or solitude and faint melancholy—interlock quietly within a single frame, inviting viewers to encounter their own memories and emotions without strain. I Kyoung Ha favors subdued chroma and controlled value, building density through a traditional painterly process that often begins with a dark underpainting and gradually shifts from shadow toward light. Through this method, she constructs an inner temperature and temporal depth that extend beyond the image on the surface.

Having earned a BFA in Painting from Hongik University and completed coursework in Special Video & Graphic Design at Sogang University’s Graduate School of Mass Communication, I Kyoung Ha has consistently expanded an attitude of “looking” and “staying”—as suggested by series titles such as Gaze of Stillness (2024), A Looking Heart (2023), and Quietly Swaying (2022). Across her exhibitions, she continues to refine a visual language that does not insist, but remains—so that time, feeling, and silence can be held with care.

Set Byul LI (b.1970, S. Korea) lives in Daejeon and works in Seoul. 
Early on, the artist created paintings that intersect multiple layers of time and space through solo exhibitions such as ≪Green Catastrophe≫(2013), ≪Interface Scenery≫(2014), And ≪Layerscape≫(2022) has been released, and has dealt with the theme of social tragedy and the evils of reality hidden behind the scenery.

The key themes in her works are ‘green’ and ‘the human.’ Green, which should represent life, a place of respite, and a source of regeneration, seeps and clings to the skin—a kind of green that emanates from a system of capital that has now become our natural domain. Because seeing is always filtered through the desires of the subject who looks, a gaze that is both distorted and captivated, she questions this through the act of placing various objects or effects onto the face. Through these reconstructed landscapes and altered human forms, she explores the anguish and ethical questions of existence that emerge from the contradictions of capitalism, such as the tension between the artificial and the natural, ecological crises, and the subject in a digital society.

I paint beings that seem to carry the presence of loneliness. These are often things or creatures that feel overlooked—lost items, small animals, confined beings, objects tucked away in corners. They’re nothing extraordinary: common things anyone might own or pass by without much notice. But if you look closely, you might catch a glimpse of these quiet presences that exist between the steps of everyday life. They’re often found just off to the side of the path, missing a part of themselves, or left behind without a clear purpose.

Sometimes, in the middle of ordinary life, I feel like I’ve become something “other.” I’ve named this feeling becoming a fake human. It’s a sensation that arises when I’m walking down a street, speaking with someone, or standing among a group of people—moments when I suddenly hesitate to connect, sensing that I’m not quite the same. In those moments, I imagine myself as someone nearly human but slightly off, like a flawed copy—resembling a person, yet missing something essential.

I began drawing fragments of "people" through other beings because I believe the things shaped by humans—or whose lives have been altered through human presence—end up resembling us in subtle ways. Whether consciously created objects or living things unconsciously affected by human behavior, these entities are part of the social world we inhabit. And when they’re no longer just someone’s possession, but exist in their own right, they begin to carry a deeper sense of meaning. Their anonymity—the fact that we don’t know where they came from or where they’re going—gives them a kind of quiet, haunting weight.

In my paintings, these figures often share similar appearances. Like the strangers we pass on the street whose faces we never fully see, they fade from memory even as they surround us. I once saw a nearly new doll abandoned on the sidewalk. On another day, I passed an old man drawing on the street in the freezing winter. These are the kinds of moments I try to gather—brief scenes that make you pause for a second and look. Through my work, I want to depict the quiet, slightly unbalanced figures of ordinary people—people who, for just a moment, come into view.

Artists