lowercase focus: April 15, 2021

Welcome to lowercase focus, a bi-monthly program which seeks to highlight emerging artists and exhibitions over the world.

In my last focus article I looked at a number of emerging and mid-career artists working out of mainland China. These artists often create artwork that responds to China’s peculiar socio-political era, doing so in a quirky aesthetic. The article was well received, so I’ll be following up with a second list. For those who missed the first, it can be found here: https://www.lowercasemagazine.com/blog/lowercasefocus-18102021

Shen Xin

Shen Xin is a Chengdu born Amsterdam based artist who works in video and visual media. Her practice explores othering – in essence, the established structures (often aesthetically charged) which represent minority groups. By focusing on complex social and political narratives, through a disarming aesthetic approach to animation, Xin’s works both generate reflectiveness and dismantle political structures.

Zheng Haozhong

Zheng Haozhong is an artist I’ve been following since 2014 when he won the John Moores Painting Prize, China. Haozhong is an artist who applies a surreal aesthetic to figurative painting, regularly portraying scenes from his upbringing in rural China. Recently, diptych and triptych works by Haozhong have added a storyboard-like layer to his art, depicting characters in wholistic scenes.

Lu Pingyuan

Lu Pingyuan is the most conceptual artist on this list. A creator of ‘stories’, Pingyuan became known for his written and sparse texts which are now often accompanied by elaborate installations. From a tale of fathering a kitten named Schrödinger to another of a troubled chameleon running rampant in a museum, they are part quirky, part endearing and always challenging.

Lu Yang

Shanghai based artist Lu Yang is a peculiar, irreverent, gaudy and inspiring artist who has the talent to turn the most taboo topics, cancer cells and sanitary products included, into something appealing. Working predominantly in animation and video, Yang’s aesthetic style can be described as an amalgamation of manga and video game influences with lurid editing. A good place to start is Delusional Mandala, a piece created in 2015 which uses a stereotactic approach to explore the neurological symptoms of dying.

Liu Chengrui

Chengrui is a conceptual artist currently based in Beijing whose durational projects sit between endearing and shocking. Take Looking for my lost finger for example. In 1999, Chengrui removed his own left finger and used the bone as decoration for a necklace. Nine years later, after losing the necklace, Chengrui took to Chinese message boards to attempt to recover the lost finger. Created in the style typical of ‘lost pet’ posters, and of course unsuccessful in their mission to source the lost finger, Looking for my lost finger is now comprised of hundreds of the posters and has been shown in galleries throughout China as well as Australia and Russia.

Emerson Radisich is a curator, writer and educator currently based in Melbourne, Australia.

Cover picture: Lu Yang from Seditionart