Devoting itself to closely following the development of contemporary art practices in China, Art+ Shanghai Gallery offers a selection of emerging and established artists at the upcoming Art021 Shanghai 2023. Art+ Shanghai Gallery will showcase works by 5 artists for this edition.

The selected artists represent a careful combination of well-established gallery artists, such as Ye Hongxing and Liu Lei, along with promising young emerging artists, Lin Fanglu and Tang Zhengwei. Additionally, Art+ Shanghai will showcase works from the renowned Spanish artist Alicia Framis for the first time at Art021.

Alicia Framis

Alicia Framis is a contemporary Spanish artist living and working in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She develops platforms for creative social interaction, often through interdisciplinary collaboration with other artists and specialists across various fields. Framis often starts out from actual social dilemmas to develop novel settings and proposed solutions. Framis studied with the French minimalist artist Daniel Buren and the American conceptual artist Dan Graham and her work can be located within the lineages of relational aesthetics, performance art, and social practice art. 

She represented the Netherlands in the Dutch Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). She is currently the director of an MA program at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, Netherlands and a lecturer at Nebrija University in Madrid, Spain. In 2019, Alicia Framis was awarded with the Lucas Artists Visual Arts Fellowship 2019-2022 in California

Framis’ work has been widely featured in museums, galleries, and public spaces around the world. Her works are included in numerous permanent collections, including those of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C in the United States, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Beijing (China), El Museo del Barrio New York (US), Philadelphia Museum (US), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst Zurich (Switzerland), Museum Boijmans van Beuningen , Rotterdam (Netherlands), The National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto (Japan), and Rabo Art Collection (Netherlands), among others.

The main work that Art+ Shanghai will present at ART021 is “Leave Here Your Wish”. Framis will present a mirrored steel sculpture. The sculpture reflects the duality between the earthly and the celestial, the real and the imaginary. It is a piece that invites reflection and contemplation of the world around us and reminds us that life is a constant search for balance between opposites. Additionally, the sculpture is interactive and allows visitors to take part in the creation of the work, becoming a collective and participatory experience.

Framis invites viewers to write down their greatest wish and deposit them into a small opening on the sculpture’s mirrored surface.

Framis believes that the porous boundaries between individuals and artworks are vital, as is the relationship.

Lin Fanglu

Lin Fanglu earned her Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Household Product Design from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 2016 and 2012, respectively.

After completing her Master's degree, she decided to gain firsthand experience in the traditions and customs of ethnic minorities in China. She conducted in-depth research on the disappearing techniques of tie-dyeing from the Bai women community in Yunnan and Dong traditional hand-woven bright cloth in Guizhou.

Her new series of textiles has been showcased in several exhibitions in China and overseas. In 2020, she was selected as one of the 30 finalists for the prestigious LOEWE FOUNDATION CRAFT PRIZE, out of thousands of applicants from around the world. In 2021, she was awarded the first prize for the LOEWE FOUNDATION CRAFT PRIZE.

Her works have been collected by various private collectors and museums. Her latest creation, acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, will be featured in the Melbourne Triennial in 2023.

As a Chinese female weaving artist, Lin Fanglu re-examines and plans the traditional techniques related to women. In her hands, fabrics and threads are reorganized and intertwined to create exquisitely sculpted outlines. 

Lin Fanglu’s inspiration mainly comes from the Bai ethnic group located in Yunnan. She has taken a part of the numerous crafts of Bai women weavers, upgraded it and brought it back to life. This traditional technique has been passed down for thousands of years and has been revived in Lin Fanglu’s hands. Her sculptures resemble blooming flowers, lush forests, underwater landscapes, or alien creatures. It is her imaginative power and practical creativity that have successfully brought this technique of “za hua” (flower tying) to the public eye and international stage. These ordinary fabrics seem to come to life in her hands, extending gracefully like the female body.

Rather than making flat works, the artist experiments with complicated geometrical patterns and traditional types of stitching she has learned in the villages, pushing the pliable medium into three dimensions, producing tactile objects of art.

Through her artwork, she also conveys the current dilemma of women - those rural hard-working women who are still neglected and forgotten in the society. But with the expression of female strength in her works, she believes that one day, women will awaken again and be remembered by the world.

Ye Hongxing

Ye Hongxing completed her Master’s degree in Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Art CAFA, Beijing. Her unique aesthetic has earned her popular acclaim worldwide. She has collaborated with designer Christian Louboutin, and is widely collected by high-profile figures within China and abroad. 

Ye Hongxing has exhibited at galleries and museums throughout China, Europe, and the United States, and has been shown internationally at fairs including Paris Art Fair, London Art Fair, Art Central (Hong Kong), Art Stage Singapore, India Art Fair (New Delhi), Art Basel (Miami), SH Contemporary Art Fair (Shanghai), Art Beijing Contemporary Art Fair (Beijing), Art Taipei, Art Cologne, Scope (Basel, New York), PULSE (New York), Art Asia (Miami), where her installation was labeled one of the fair’s highlights.

She is the recipient of several awards including the Dragon Air Emerging Chinese Artist Award in 2006, selected by the Director of Art Cologne and curator of the Asian Art Museum.

She has been featured as one of the influential female artists in the Beijing fashion magazine SKP in the issue “Woman of the Future” 2021.

More than a mirror, the canvases of Ye Hongxing are created according to the model of a kaleidoscope. Her refined sticker collages capture the spirit of present-day society in all its diversity, complexity, and dynamism. She is notably celebrated for her mixed media compositions where such ubiquitous product of our material culture as an adhesive sticker takes center stage in a dazzling and hypnotizing mosaic spectacle. Each of Hongxing’s new series is a separate universe with its own mythology, morphology, and symbolism.

The experience of beholding Ye Hongxing's kaleidoscopic visuals is similar to the one of watching a play in a theater. The more you gaze, the more characters come into focus, each taking their turn in the spotlight. The visual components of her artwork - color, form, and symbol - combine and converse, propelling the narrative forward. As a viewer, you become engrossed in the process of unraveling and interpreting the interplay between the various elements. With each new revelation, you feel a sense of discovery and deeper understanding.

Liu Lei

Liu Lei earned a Bachelor's degree from the Second Studio of the Printmaking Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2005. She earned a Master's degree from the Printmaking Department at the same institution in 2017, under the guidance of Professor Zhou Jirong. Since 2020, she has been pursuing a doctoral degree at the Graduate School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, under the supervision of Professors Zhou Jirong and Liu Libin. Her doctoral degree was obtained in 2023.

Since 2006, Liu Lei has exhibited her work in galleries and museums throughout China. Art+ Shanghai Gallery is dedicated to developing her international career.

Liu lei has been involved in printmaking creation and research since her undergraduate studies. Liu lei's attention is particularly drawn to paper. However, in her overall creation, paper has surpassed its simple role as a carrier and has become a printmaking medium, exploring the possibility of expanding the form and language of printmaking expression. As an artistic creation, it also reflects her perception and cognition of society and thought.

Liu Lei's artistic methodology is derived from the "block-printing" mode of printmaking. She uses paper material to portray the relationship between the artist and contemporary life as well as the external world. Liu Lei believes that she is still in the embryonic stage of this path, which is a difficult and lengthy process that requires constant self-examination and self-transcendence in order to blossom and bear fruit. This process is similar to her artwork, which requires peeling away layer by layer to approach the true essence of things.

Through this work, Liu Lei aims to simulate the process of human cognition. Human cognition starts with surface appearances, but how far is it from the truth? While the truth may be elusive, she firmly believes that behind surface appearance there is more than meets the eye. The changes in the paper layers and traces reveal the truth behind it, and the color shifts also reflect the limits of human understanding.

Tang Zhengwei

Tang Zhengwei was born in 1987 in Chengzhou, China. He received his Bachelor's degree in Mural Painting at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, in 2011, and his Master's degree in Experimental Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, in 2018.

Currently, Tang concentrates his artistic practice on paper cutting. He creates detailed works out of various materials, including water bottle labels, milk cartons, and rice paper, as well as large-scale papercutting sculptures. His works express his profound interest in the current social, economic, and environmental state of affairs in China and the world.

Tang's art is the result of thorough research, scrupulous data analysis, and sophisticated mathematical calculations. His works have been exhibited in China and Japan. Notable exhibitions include group shows such as "Somewhere Only We Know" at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art and KWM Art Center in Beijing in 2016, as well as an exhibition dedicated to the future of Chinese Folk Art at the Ichihara Lakeside Museum in Japan the same year. His first solo exhibition was held at Art+ Shanghai Gallery in 2018. 

In his latest series, the artist continued to explore the possibilities of paper-cutting as an art form. This requires physical involvement and led the artist to a deeper reflection on "forces". The artist considers papercutting a form of "painting-sculpture" that, unlike traditional painting, can liberate flat properties from the plane and acquire super-flat and low sculptural properties.

Papercutting is also a process that requires force. Each time the knife and the paper confront each other through force, a subtle relationship between force and form is represented. This relationship urges the artist to think about force in a new dimension. Through science and technology, human beings upgrade and transform their environment and themselves to achieve evolution. In this process, there are many self-aware or unaware forces that plunge them into an invisible vortex, in which invisible forces push human development in an unknown direction.

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