Last week, I introduced four promising female artists born after 1995 with overseas backgrounds, and the response was encouraging. This time, I’m turning to four other artists of the same generation who left China earlier and received almost all of their fine-art education in the West. Their experiences have shaped practices that are more inclusive, diverse, and international in outlook, engaging with questions of Chinese and Western culture and identity.
Some have already attracted the attention of major international blue-chip galleries or been covered by mainstream Western media. Several have a clear sense of direction and defined goals for their careers, which makes me hopeful about what lies ahead. Artist Du Jingze Born in 1995, the Chinese-Irish artist Du Jingze moved from China to Ireland at thirteen and has lived there ever since. He is now emerging rapidly in the Western art world.
Since 2020, he has held solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, and China. Last month, his new exhibition, “Grey Area,” opened at Hive Center for Contemporary Art in Shanghai, presenting eighteen works made in 2023, all in black and white. I saw tributes to classical oil painting—Rembrandt’s The Night Watch and Madonna and Child, Van Gogh’s sunflowers, cottages, and self-portraits—alongside his observations of friends, “abstract painting,” and everyday objects.
Du Jingze, “Grey Area,” exhibition view, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghai, 2023. The subjects in his paintings are remarkably varied: tributes to and reinterpretations of masterpieces and art history; reflections on popular culture; discussions of old and new knowledge and technology; and straightforward depictions of animals. He uses imagery that appears digital and flattened to explore the possibilities of contemporary painting. Du has been interested in art since childhood. He began drawing at five, and before leaving China at thirteen, studied drawing in a preparatory class alongside students preparing for the gaokao, receiving rigorous training in sketching and figure drawing.
After arriving in Ireland, he continued to paint almost instinctively. He found the environment different from China: individual expression was particularly valued, as was originality. Many works appear simple, he said, but require close, patient attention to their styles and techniques. Du Jingze, Rembrandt: Self-Portrait (1658), 2023. Du Jingze, “Grey Area,” exhibition view, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghai, 2023. In conversation, he laughed that he was “a learner who interacts with the world,” perpetually curious about life.
“Ireland helped me enormously in developing theoretical thinking. They place great importance on independent thought. By reading, listening to music, visiting museums, and discussing art with classmates, I gradually learned about the West while also developing the strengths I carry from the East. Especially after graduating, I understood that one must be proactive in making work, have a conceptual foundation, and truly experience creative freedom.” Du Jingze, “American Gothic,” exhibition view, Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, 2023. Du Jingze, King James, 2023. Although Jingze has always lived in Dublin, like his peers he has been deeply influenced by American popular culture—films, sports, heroes, cartoon characters, and more.
He was fascinated by Disney from an early age. During home quarantine abroad in 2020, he read Robert Iger’s autobiography and, inspired by it, painted his first Mickey Mouse. After that, he gradually began painting American athletes and singers, including James and Jayson Peter.
“I felt as if, through painting, I had spent a period of time ‘attached’ to these people,” Jingze said with a laugh. Du Jingze, Mickey, 2020. Du Jingze, Billie, 2020. Du Jingze, Popstar, 2020. Animals also appear frequently in his work, a presence rooted in his childhood.
“My grandfather had an orchard. It was like an Eden, an ideal place far from the world, with many dogs of all sizes. I often ran there in the summers—a very innocent, free memory. That’s why I still keep two dogs, two rabbits, and three sheep in my studio. I feel they are the studio’s ‘soul animals.’” Du Jingze and his animals. Du Jingze in his studio. Du Jingze, Qilin, 2023. He works exclusively in black and white because, with so much curiosity and so many interests, he gives himself a small “restriction”: eliminating color.
“I’ve secretly been experimenting with color. It’s another goal for the future. Going from black and white to color is like going from A to B. I want to do A well first, and then move on to B.” Artist Fang Yuan. Fang was born in Shenzhen in 1996 and earned an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has lived in New York for most of her education and career. In recent years, she has attracted attention in both China and the West, participating in numerous exhibitions in New York, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.
Just days ago, her large-scale solo exhibition opened at the Long Museum in Shanghai. For an artist of her age, a solo exhibition at a museum of this scale can resemble a giant “certificate” from the art world—a dual acknowledgment from academia and the market. Fang Yuan, “Raging Waves,” exhibition view, Long Museum, Shanghai, 2024. Image courtesy of the Long Museum. Photograph by shaunley. Her abstract paintings are heated, bold, and restless; each seems to churn toward a new possibility, much like Fang herself—passionate, rebellious, and unafraid of conflict.
“I’m someone who dares to love and hate. I speak directly, and there isn’t much gray area.” Fang Yuan, “Raging Waves,” exhibition view, Long Museum, Shanghai, 2024. Image courtesy of the Long Museum. Photograph by shaunley. Fang Yuan, Undercurrent 02 (detail), 2023. Fang told us that the curves in her paintings come from her feeling that straight lines are a masculine quality, while the female body is naturally made of curves.
Female desire, too, is soft and indirect. Fang grew up in Shenzhen and moved to New York at eighteen. Only then did she begin painting. She decided firmly to become a full-time artist, leaving herself no fallback.
“When I decided I wanted to become an artist, my parents were strongly opposed. It was completely contrary to the route they had planned for me: attend a top high school, get into the Ivy League, and manage fund investments.” Fang’s parents were what we recognize as “typical Asian parents.” Though they eventually grudgingly agreed to let her attend art school, they warned her, “Don’t come to us for money.” She therefore worked part-time from college onward, and began painting later than many artists her age.
Fang Yuan’s early works. Fang Yuan’s early sketches. When I asked why she began with abstraction, without ever passing through a “from figurative to abstract” phase, she said the central principle running through her work was this: she does not paint things that can be seen in real life.
“At first, I made art to escape reality. Painting was like a shelter for my soul,” she said. Her recent work also considers “what is East” and “what is West.” The more than twenty new works shown at the Long Museum reveal the influence of Western Abstract Expressionism in their painterly language, while their colors draw on Eastern elements, including Dunhuang murals and ancient Chinese bronzes. Fang Yuan, Last-Day Wildflower, 2023. Fang Yuan, Echo 01, 2023. “Although I grew up in China, it was in the United States that I rediscovered my ‘roots’ as a Chinese person. The first time I consciously wanted to study ancient Chinese artifacts and Buddhist statues was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States.”
When she first arrived in the United States, she lacked confidence in her identity as an Asian person. After adapting, she began her own search for roots. Through her new work, she hopes to narrate her hybrid Eastern and Western identity, and her understanding, reconciliation, and compromises within it. Fang Yuan working in her studio, Brooklyn, New York, 2023. During her undergraduate studies, she disliked people linking her work to Chinese calligraphy. She felt that she had become a painter under the influence of the Western art world.
As she matured, however, she found herself increasingly drawn to de Kooning’s late work, partly because its freehand quality resembled the expressive spontaneity of Chinese calligraphy.
“The artist who has influenced my work most deeply is Francis Bacon. His paintings show many anatomized bodies and grotesquely distorted emotions, and they have had a major influence on my desire, within abstraction, to work through different levels of refinement.” Fang Yuan’s studio in Brooklyn, New York. She says she rarely goes looking for inspiration; it usually appears in moments she catches in daily life. Walking home from the studio, for example, she might look up and see the moon caught between bare branches, then use that composition in a detail of a painting the next day.
I noticed the areas she fills and removes. She said the inspiration came from half-stripped advertising posters on New York streets. Fang Yuan in her Brooklyn studio. Fang says she is neither fond of nor good at socializing. She generally works quietly and is somewhat insensitive to the details of life around her. Perhaps New York’s greatest benefit is that it has given her the freedom to choose her circle.
“I go to the studio in the morning and come home after dark, almost every day. Deep down, I’m still that typical Asian person who feels uncomfortable if she isn’t working, haha,” Fang said with a laugh. Artist Li Heidi. Li was born in Shenyang, China, in 1997. She came to the United States at fifteen to attend high school, then studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art, one of the country’s leading art schools. During her sophomore year, she suddenly decided to change environments and went to London to study in the United Kingdom. In 2021, the year before graduation, she appeared at the West Bund Art & Design fair in Shanghai.
Her practice spans painting, installation, video, and performance, moving between abstraction and figuration. For her, this range is closely tied to an experience of “always being pulled in different directions.” She is conscious of this and joked in conversation that she is often somewhat “messy.” Her most striking breakthrough, and the opportunity that brought her to wider attention in the art world, was her participation in the group exhibition “Uncanny Valley: The Body” at Gagosian’s Hong Kong space in 2023. To appear in a group exhibition at such a top-tier gallery at so young an age was remarkable.
“Uncanny Valley: The Body,” exhibition view, Gagosian Hong Kong, 2023. Photograph by Martin Wong. Image copyright Gagosian. Li Heidi, Vaporized Time, 2022–2023. Speaking about the Gagosian group exhibition, Heidi told me that the experience was entirely unexpected.
“When I saw the exhibition photographs and my painting hanging beside a work by Song Yuanyuan, an artist I really admire, I was so happy. I had to make a new painting for the exhibition. Before finishing it, I was anxious about whether I could complete it; after it was shipped, I worried that it might not be good enough. With every exhibition, I’m simply grateful if I manage to finish the work, haha. The whole process felt like a dream.” Li left alone for the United States at fifteen to attend high school and college, and later went to London to study fine art. All her higher art education took place in the West.
Recalling art education in China, she said the “only two” experiences she could really mention were drawing plaster casts and still lifes in a private art class at eleven or twelve. Li Heidi, Sodomitical Maternity, 2022. “I was excited at the thought of drawing plaster casts on weekends, laying down lines with a pencil one by one. Compared with the tediousness of middle school, drawing what I saw without having to think was therapeutic. Watching a blank sheet slowly fill with lines gave me a rare sense of accomplishment.”
She also took China’s standardized entrance examination for students with artistic aptitude, completing a drawing within a set period and then comparing it horizontally with other works.
“The rules of that exam made me anxious and erased much of the pleasure of drawing. It wasn’t until I studied in the United States that I recovered that pleasure,” she said. Li Heidi, Concubine Fell in Deep Sea, 2021. Through her studies in the United States and the United Kingdom, she found that Western institutions generally cared more about a work’s distinctiveness and originality than about pure technical skill.
Compared with the United States, the United Kingdom places greater emphasis on theory and logical thinking, and is more open.
“At the Maryland Institute College of Art, every class received an A, B, C, or D, and it was common to have a frightening deadline—one large painting every two weeks and forty small paintings every month. Because grades mattered, I felt I was rushing through assignments day and night instead of creating with real attention.” That pressure prompted Heidi to change environments, and she moved to London. Li Heidi, Liquid Meadow in the Lust of Dawn, 2022. The work, three meters long, is the largest painting she has made to date; it was exhibited at Pippy Houldsworth in early 2023. At Chelsea College of Arts in the United Kingdom, she found that no one cared about grades or about whether she was “working hard.” What mattered was theory and more novel forms of artistic expression.
“The question I was asked most often was, ‘Why do you paint?’ I sometimes felt behind because I was still painting in oils, and was embarrassed to admit that I was a painter. So whenever the school held an exhibition, I showed only sculptures and performance works,” she said. Li Heidi, Escape at Night, 2021. When I asked whether living abroad for so many years had raised questions of identity, she said, “Identity is a huge subject. As I’ve grown and my surroundings have changed, I’ve rejected it, searched for it, and let it drift.
Whether culturally or in terms of gender, I still feel stuck in the middle.” That feeling of being “stuck in the middle” has kept her practice in a state of constant tension. On an unconscious level, she has pursued images that are both abstract and figurative.
“I want both abstract expression and the softness of the human body. I’ve continued working around these two themes, but because my technique was immature early on, I went through several stages and have continued experimenting with different styles and methods.” Li Heidi, Cucumber Friday, 2021. “I believe styles come in cycles. I often want to repaint an old work, but perhaps because my state of mind is different, it’s always difficult to reproduce the technique I used then.
When I painted Cucumber Friday, I felt something click. The whole painting came easily, and for the first time I achieved the translucent film-like quality I wanted.” Li Heidi, The Lover Asks Forgiveness Because of His Many Moods, 2021. When she painted this work, Heidi had just watched Suzhou River and was obsessed with Zhou Xun; her mind was filled with Zhou’s face, and she wanted to paint her.
“I think the painting successfully combines all the elements I wanted: the apparition of a face—the mermaid face—emerging through water or from the deep sea.” Li Heidi, Solace of the Night Sky, 2022. Solace of the Night Sky was the first painting she made for her 2022 solo exhibition at LINSEED in Shanghai, where she began exploring a style that interweaves disordered underwater light with half-visible apparitions of the human body.
Li Heidi, 4 SOLOS, 2022. Li Heidi, Throat Slit Opened by the Sun, 2023. Asked about one of the works she is most satisfied with this year, she immediately thought of this passionate, tense, and even somewhat violent-titled painting, recently exhibited at Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles.
“I’ve always wanted to paint something intensely orange and hot, with a person or ghost fighting—like the scene in Ashes of Time in which Hung Chi fights the bandits in the blazing desert.” Miriam Cahn exhibition view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist. In May, Heidi also traveled to Paris. The experience that impressed her most was artist Miriam Cahn’s exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo.
“The demonic quality of the figures in her paintings kept me awake at night. I was truly shaken. I also want to make paintings that bewitch people and eat their souls.” Heidi has major solo exhibitions planned this year as well: at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London in March, and in the autumn, back in China at Chishe in Shanghai. For an artist of her age who has only recently exhibited at Gagosian, Heidi appears remarkably calm and clear-eyed.
“I hope that, within the rapidly moving art market, I can find a rhythm that suits me—work carefully and have enough time to make each painting well. Beyond that, I’d like to continue exploring other media, including sculpture and performance.” Artist Alexander Si. Credit: Abrons Art Center. Photograph by Daqi Fang. Alexander Si was born in Wuhan, China, in 1996. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2021, he remained active in downtown New York’s art scene.
He is closely connected to New York’s Asian and other minority communities, often reflecting from an Asian perspective on mainstream American culture, contemporary discourse, and social dilemmas. His involvement is so hands-on that it resembles “fieldwork.” His practice centers on video, performance, and installation. In 2022, in a gallery in New York’s Chinatown, he built by hand a chain-salad brand called Sweet Green that was nearly indistinguishable from the real thing, prompting written and video coverage from major art publications including Artnet, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail.
Alexander Si’s work shown at Untitled Art Fair in Miami. Alexander Si, Britney, 2021. Image copyright the artist. He told me that he was an especially “elastic” person. He went to Toronto, Canada, ten years ago and later came to New York, experiencing a great deal in between.
“For me, whether in art or in life, adapting quickly is essential. Otherwise, you get eliminated.” Alex studied architecture and media at the University of Toronto as an undergraduate. Although related to art, the fields were not closely connected. After graduating, he worked in magazines and fashion photography, and it was only after arriving in New York that he truly began learning how to make art. When I first asked why he did not paint, he answered frankly: “Because I’m really not very good at painting, and personally I think painting is too limited a medium.
More of my inspiration in art comes from what I see and feel in life. Then I slowly bring those things into being with my own hands.” Alexander Si, REAR WINDOW, 2021. In his work, he uses photography and video, as well as modeling skills he learned while studying architecture.
“If I don’t know how to do something, I can learn. For an earlier work, I wanted to use the wooden boxes people stand on in film studios when shooting Hollywood movies. I looked them up online and found they cost one or two hundred dollars each, which was too expensive for me. So I taught myself woodworking, starting with sawing wood, and eventually made more than forty boxes.” For Alex, one of the most exciting things about making art is that every new work allows him to learn a new skill.
The exterior of Sweet Green in Chinatown, made by Alexander Si, 2022. The interior of Sweet Green in Chinatown, made by Alexander Si, 2022. The Sweet Green salad-shop work that attracted widespread discussion in the American mainstream media simulated, inside a Chinatown gallery, an American salad chain popular with white office workers.
The real Sweet Green is a well-known New York chain that sells the idea of healthy eating at very high prices. Its customers are almost entirely white, while its service staff are almost entirely people of color.
“In a small salad shop, you can see the state of American society. Millions of immigrants are continually exploited by so-called ‘elites,’ and the class divide is stark. As immigrants, if we want to integrate into this society, we have to work harder than other people,” Alex said. Alexander Si, Sweet Green, 2022. The artist hired people to pose as employees. While making the project, he also learned welding. Every table, chair, shelf, and airbrushed advertising panel in the shop was made by hand, piece by piece.
“The shop fooled a lot of people. Some white customers really thought Sweet Green had opened in Chinatown. They’d come in saying, ‘I’m so hungry,’ then discover that it was fake when they tried to order, and get angry with me. It was pretty funny,” Alex recalled with a laugh. Later, even the well-known New York radio program National Public Radio came to interview him. Alex said that the day after the interview was published, the founder and CEO of Sweet Green both reposted it on social media.
Alexander Si, Birkin, 2023. “I was terrified. I worried I’d receive legal papers from them about infringement. But they didn’t, and they continued following me on Instagram,” he said. Unlike a traditional artist working at an easel, he approaches art as an exploration of society and an interrogation of its conditions. His new work Birkin, for example, is a Hermès Birkin bag he made by hand, stitch by stitch, over eighty-five hours, and displayed in a gallery vitrine.
Alexander Si, 170 FORSYTH, 2023. In another work, he began with a model of a building and built by hand a fake luxury real-estate sales office called 170 FORSYTH. Through these works, he hopes to examine the relationship among art, money, and power.
“I’m currently teaching graduate courses at a university in the United States. Many students want to sign with a good gallery and sell their paintings well; those are the only things people care about. But the people who can actually support themselves by selling paintings are extremely rare.” Alex also spoke about the art world’s restlessness and eagerness to monetize. Alexander Si, FULFILLMENT CENTER, PT. 1, 2023. Alexander Si, 10-HOUR SHIFT FC_COURIER 10-HOUR SHIFT (NEW YORK, 02/19/2023), 2023. When I asked what New York’s Asian community was like, Alex opened the floodgates.
“I find the Asian community here incredibly warm. Without its support, I wouldn’t have made it this far as a young Chinese-American artist. So I want to do more to give back to this extended family that has given me so much.”
“For example, in New York’s Chinatown I’ve met older Fuzhounese immigrants who repair shoes, clothes, umbrellas, and watches. Most have only a tiny, rudimentary shop, almost like a stairwell.” As members of the older generation of Chinese immigrants have died and the consumption habits of younger Chinese Americans have changed, people buy new things when old ones break. The repair workers have fewer and fewer customers, sometimes sitting in their shops all day. They seem gradually abandoned and forgotten by their era.
Alexander Si, Fortune Cookies, 2023. “With my next project, I hope more people will recognize that this group exists. I don’t know what the finished work will look like, but I genuinely hope I can help them,” Alex said. He sees this as his way of giving back to the Asian community. Because many of his works satirize some of the invisible “walls” in the United States, I asked whether he hoped to change anything through his art.
“I wouldn’t call it change. I’m very careful whenever I make a work; I don’t want it to sound preachy. I just want it to be like a news report—without personal emotion, as objective as possible, simply letting people ‘see.’” Image courtesy of the artists’ studios and relevant galleries.