In the past year, everyone seemed to sense a changing of the guard in the contemporary art market. Artists born in the 1990s now claim a far larger share of secondary-market sales, chased by collectors closer to their own age, and major museums and galleries have been filling their walls with new names born after 1995. At the beginning of 2024 I sat down with eight artists who share that birth decade, who have one foot in China and one abroad, and who have already made names for themselves, to talk about their work, their sense of identity, and where they see their careers heading.
The four artists in this installment all grew up in China, where they trained in the fundamentals of painting, before going abroad for their higher education and maturing, gradually, inside a Western art-school system. Some have already had solo shows at major museums; others have collected international prizes. They are, by any measure, a rising force that is hard to ignore. Four more artists with similarly split backgrounds will follow in the next installment, out on January 30th.
Liane Zhu Liqing was born in Hong Kong in 1997. She has had Tourette syndrome since childhood, a condition that makes it hard for her to concentrate and causes her body to twitch involuntarily. Painting, she has found, calms the symptoms and settles her whole body. Her art education has taken her everywhere: Chinese ink painting during her early years in Hong Kong, three months at an academy in Florence spent working on a single canvas, and later Spain and the United States, where she found a looser, more uninhibited way of making art.
Eventually she came back to China for a master's degree at the School of Experimental Art and Technology at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, studying under Qiu Zhijie, one of the pillars of Chinese contemporary art today. Hong Kong's leading art press has covered her work, which has shown in London, New York, and Finland, among other places. At the time we spoke, her first museum solo show was on view at the Aurora Museum in Shanghai, and her calendar for the following year was already filled with exhibitions and projects.
For someone so young, Zhu has moved through her career with striking ease. At the opening, she stood beside the curator Zheng Gang, reflecting that the work in her Aurora Museum show marked a real departure from her earlier "Fissure" series.
"This body of work is a conversation between me and the pieces themselves," she told me. "When I was a child, with the Tourette's, I'd blink and twitch constantly, and back then I thought it was the trees that were moving — that nature was waving at me." Her solo show, "In an Instant," ran at the Aurora Museum of Art in Shanghai in 2023. "It wasn't until I was a bit older that I realized I was the one doing the twitching. I called the show 'In an Instant' because the tics come on suddenly, beyond my control, and I wanted to capture that split second."
Zhu told me the title also had something to do with her thinking about the digital age. People today feel as though they're in control while staring at their screens, she said, when in fact they're passively absorbing whatever the media feeds them. In one painting, Zhu Liqing's If I Could, I'd Love to Dance With the Storm (2023, oil on canvas, 190 × 243 cm), the twitching lines and hallucinatory color are her way of getting at the idea of the "flashing screen" — people losing themselves for hours in their phones and computers, drifting further and further from nature.
The recurring image of trees carries a related hope: that people might look up, and reconnect with the natural world. In Midnight Trio (2023, oil on canvas, 152 × 173 cm), Zhu returns to that idea. Trees and nature, she said, are wonderful listeners — they don't size you up the way people do, don't carry any prejudice, and simply watch and listen in silence.
"Midnight Trio was inspired by Mozart. I love trio compositions, so I painted this as a kind of tribute to the composer." As a child in Hong Kong, Zhu studied Chinese ink painting, an education that shaped her feel for Chinese landscape painting; the ink-splash elements of her earlier "Fissure" series grew directly out of those early lessons. Every summer after that she went to study in a different country. In Spain, the school she attended had been founded by former students of Picasso's own studio.
It was there that she first worked in oil and acrylic, encountered a far richer and more vivid palette than she'd known before, and learned what real "creativity" felt like. "Something else struck me hard," she said, thinking back on the shift from her earlier "Fissure" series. "At home, there's a kind of protective, conservative attitude toward the body, culturally. But in Europe, people think of the body as a work of art, a masterpiece of God's, so students take turns modeling nude for each other."
"I was in the middle of a happy conversation with a girl there, and she suddenly took off her clothes in front of me and walked up to model. I was startled, but it was also wonderful — because whether they were men or women, they all saw baring their bodies as being in service of art, without a trace of shyness or awkwardness." During her three months at the academy in Florence, Zhu said, she worked on only a single painting the entire time, rendering it in painstaking detail. Her family, she told me, did not support her decision to become a professional artist at first — they even cut off her financial support entirely for a while — but in the end she survived on love for the work and sheer persistence.
"My grandfather is from Meixian, near Guangzhou. My grandmother is half Shanghainese, half Taiwanese. My mother is from Fujian. And I grew up in Hong Kong. I feel like I've somehow pulled together every corner of China in myself." When I asked about her plans for the coming year, I was startled to find her calendar essentially full, and full of major solo projects at that: a solo presentation with Seefoodroom at Art Central in Hong Kong in mid-March, a solo show at K11 in Guangzhou in June, a group show with Galerie Dumonteil in Paris in mid-June, a solo project with the well-known Long Story Short in New York in September, and a solo show with Galerie Dumonteil in Shanghai in December.
"Childhood in China was the spark. Studying abroad was the nourishment. And now, coming home, is the blossoming. The mountains and trees in my work really do come out of Chinese landscape and ink painting — I'm just rendering them in a more futuristic, more technological form. After going to so many places, I still want to carry Chinese culture out into the world through my art," she told me, with evident confidence.
Zhang Meng — also known by her birth name, Zhang Hongru — was born in 1995, but she is already, in a sense, a veteran. She picked up a brush at five and has been painting for more than twenty years since.
She went to the University of the Arts London in 2013 and stayed through a graduate degree, but rather than remain in London afterward, she returned to China and went on to earn a doctorate at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Her paintings are re-stagings and reinterpretations of the classical Chinese landscape tradition. Last May she held her first museum solo show, "Mood and Poetics," at Today Art Museum in Beijing, followed in November by a small solo exhibition in Japan.
"Natural" and "intense" are the two words that run through her work consistently, and they double as how she thinks of herself. As a young artist trained in pure Western fine art who has nonetheless devoted herself, from the start, to Chinese landscape painting, Zhang cuts an unusual figure.
"I think what you paint and how you paint it has to do with your own temperament, not with whether your education was Eastern or Western," Zhang told me. She began painting at five and took up ink painting around age seven, often copying the landscapes of the seventeenth-century monk-painter Shitao, and was naturally drawn into the aesthetic and cultural depth of the old masters.
Even now, she says, sitting with a great master's landscape painting still feels like something that nourishes her.
"The artists who've influenced me most are Shitao and Zao Wou-Ki," she said. Five years of Western fine-art training gave her, above all, a shift in outlook — a clearer, more honest understanding of where she came from and why she paints the way she does.
"Western education cultivated my independence as an artist, rather than simply telling me, 'this is how you should paint.'" Once she returned to China for her doctorate, Zhang studied under the painter Su Xinping, and she considers herself lucky to have found a mentor who focused on drawing out each student's own artistic instincts.
"In the studio, Professor Su was always pushing us to develop our own way of seeing and our own way of expressing it, so in a sense my two educations, Western and Chinese, turned out to be of a piece. Working abroad, the difference in cultural background naturally shapes different aesthetic leanings. But what's interesting about art is that it isn't bound by language or culture — the feeling, the inner vitality of an image, carries across." In Realm 20211111 (2021), a painting she made that year, Zhang worked for the first time with pastel, a material she has loved ever since for its texture.
She has made small pastel studies since 2020 as a way to stay immersed, day to day, in the act of making work. In Realm 20211111, she layered ink first, then oil, then pastel — three materials, three distinct personalities. Ink is soft and moist, oil is fine-grained, and pastel has a granular texture all its own.
"This was a new experiment for me. Ever since that painting, I've kept working in this combined medium, because it lets my particular painting language come through." Of her recent work, she singled out Realm 20230325 (2023) — the painting she made just before her solo show at Today Art Museum — as among the pieces she is proudest of.
As for this year's plans, she told me she has projects underway both in China and abroad, though she isn't in any hurry. "For a museum-scale solo show, I'd still rather wait until the work has taken on some new dimension, or there's simply more of it, before I commit to planning one."
Song Xiangni, born in 1998, is a Beijing native through and through. She moved to New York in 2016 and has lived and worked there ever since, finishing her M.F.A. at Pratt Institute last year.
Her paintings are visually mischievous — delicately rendered figures alongside the small, throwaway details of daily life. She's especially good at weaving together concrete physical space and a rich inner world with brushwork that looks loose but is, in fact, exact. Her show "Torrent of Memory" was on view at Village One Art gallery in New York in 2023.
People playing mahjong, interacting with animals in a courtyard, or simply cats and dogs — her palette often looks as if it's been filtered through a thin wash of red, yellow, or green.
Looking through that colored lens, you keep spotting surreal details she's slipped into otherwise ordinary scenes. She half-joked to me that she's a "narcissist": look closely at her figures and it isn't hard to find traces of herself — big round eyes, a small, straight nose, a gaze that shifts between dazed and sharp. Song told me she's been unable to stop doodling since she was a small child. In elementary school she scrawled in the margins of her textbooks and got caught in random inspections, with teachers telling her she was wasting her education and ruining school property.
So she switched to drawing in secret, on scraps of paper, in the corners of notebooks — there was a thrill to it, she said, like living on the edge of something forbidden. But her feelings about drawing, as a child, stayed conflicted: she loved it, and she also worried, as everyone around her seemed to be telling her, that it really was useless. In Front Yard (2020, oil on canvas, 66 × 101.6 cm), she returns to that early tension. "Before high school in Beijing, drawing was just a hobby — I took the occasional sketching class, but mostly I was doodling little figures on printer paper and in the margins of my textbooks.
Before the high-school entrance exams, I got caught doodling in my desk drawer during a physics class I couldn't follow, and the drawing was confiscated. But instead of scolding me after class, the teacher told me she used to draw before her own college entrance exams too, that it helped her decompress, and that she understood. She told me the work was good, wished me well — just, please, not during her class. I remember thinking: maybe I should actually take this seriously," Song recalled. Her family eventually agreed that if she had this much passion for drawing, she should study it properly, so for high school she enrolled at the affiliated school of the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts, where she finally got a systematic grounding in the fundamentals as taught in China.
Once she arrived in New York for her undergraduate degree, she found art education there far looser — more focused on cultivating taste and personal awareness than on the kind of measurable technical fundamentals Chinese art schools emphasize. It was the opposite of the Chinese approach of "laying the foundation before you build the house."
"It's strange — back home, where the fundamentals were drilled into me so rigorously, I couldn't even work out a formula for how to draw something. In New York, my fundamentals actually leapt forward, almost because I stopped worrying about them," Song said. In her own experience, both matter: a free, unguarded sensibility and solid technical grounding are equally indispensable to making art. Her style, to date, has gone through three major shifts. She began with a fairly traditional approach, moving successfully from illustration into oil painting as she got a feel for the properties and expressive range of oil paint.
Partway through graduate school, she went through a period of confusion and false starts. "I spent a lot of that time trying out different mediums, making small studies and drawings," she said, laughing a little at herself. Her current phase, she says, is one of much greater clarity about what she wants to do, is doing, and intends to do — the product of a long process of trial, error, and refinement.
"What ends up on the canvas now is much closer to what I actually want. My color choices, and what I'm trying to say with them, are clearer and more natural than before," she said. Asked about life in New York, she talked first about the loose, permissive creative environment and the sheer number of high-quality shows, which keep feeding her fresh ideas practically by the minute. "But the cost of living is brutal, honestly!
The way I talk with other young artists around my age isn't quite the kind of studious exchange people imagine — it's mostly about life, about feelings: not wanting to go to a day job, feeling emo, what book I read today, come gossip with me..." At that point in our conversation, Song dropped the seriousness of talking about her work and gave me the kind of knowing, easy grin you only see from people her age. Looking at her paintings, it isn't hard to spot the influence of Nicole Eisenman, a favorite of the New York art world, and the German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, both artists she has long admired, in her compositions and color.
When I asked about her plans for the future, she broke into a wide grin. "No plans. I paint when I want to paint, and when I don't, I read or rest. All I hope is that next year is like every year before it: I love painting, I'm grateful, and I want to keep going with an open heart."
Xu Yang was born in Shandong province in 1996 and went to London in 2014 for a foundation year, staying on afterward. By 2020 she held two degrees from top art schools — a bachelor's from the University of the Arts London and an M.A. in painting from the Royal College of Art.
In her paintings I keep finding traces of European art history, fashion, fairy tales, and drag performance as reference points. She treats most of her paintings as self-portraits of a kind, using them as a critical lens to probe questions of identity. The work carries the imprint of European classical painting even as it feels thoroughly avant-garde and visually forceful. True to how she describes herself — an "explorer" — her paintings seem to be testing out the range of what's possible, and they have shown in Hong Kong, London, Shanghai, Venice, Athens, and New York.
Among her paintings are It Is So Much Simpler to Bury Reality Than It Is to Dispose of Dreams (2022), Ambition (2022), and Aspiration (2022). Xu arrived in London in 2014, and during her graduate studies the pandemic hit; for much of that time she had almost no social life and worked alone in her London studio.
As some foreign media coverage of the pandemic circulated, prejudice against Chinese people began to surface more visibly abroad. Xu and the Chinese friends she knew there, along with Asians of other nationalities, experienced varying degrees of racial discrimination.
"I started painting self-portraits using my own image because I realized how deep-rooted certain prejudices against Asian people are in Western society. I wanted art to raise the visibility of Asian faces, and of other people who face that kind of prejudice, in society," Xu said. In two paintings, Touch No. 11 and Touch No. 16 (both 2022), and in her solo show "Think of Yourself as a Warrior" at MOU Projects in Hong Kong in 2023, elegant, curving hands recur throughout her work. For Xu, hands are about touch — a tool the artist uses to study the texture of materials, and also part of how she expresses feeling in daily life.
"We touch the people we love and the people close to us. Hands are also a kind of object in themselves — people express their identity through how they adorn their hands, a woman's manicure, say, or her rings." She said she deeply enjoys the process of rendering fine detail in her paintings; for her, it's almost like meditation, and in a restless society, having the time to meditate, to focus fully on one thing, feels rare and valuable. In two more paintings, Endeavour (2022) and Reckoning (2022), I also noticed graceful, spirited animals — horses, unicorns.
"I especially love animals with a certain spirit to them, horses above all, so I've painted a lot of horses and unicorns." To understand them more deeply, to capture their fleeting expressions and movements, she even took up horseback riding.
"I think you can see the purest kind of soul in a horse, and it lets me forget, for a while, the complicated side of dealing with people." Xu also has a certain artist's stubbornness of her own. "I only paint what genuinely interests me. I don't think about whether the audience is Western or Eastern, and I don't change my style to suit a particular region or a particular gallery or collector." Among her other works are Untitled (Chelsea, London) (2022) and Untitled (Città della Pieve, Umbria) (2022). She names two artists as major influences: the seventeenth-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, the first great woman artist remembered in the history of European classical painting.
"In an era when women were still shut out of the art world, she endured terrible suffering, and I find it remarkable that she transformed her own experience of violence into strength within her work," Xu said. The other is the contemporary Black artist Kehinde Wiley, known for portraits of contemporary subjects, including his famous painting of Barack Obama.
"What I feel in his work is his attention to every small detail — the way his meticulous painting gives voice to marginalized communities, the sense that everyone is part of society and everyone's identity carries equal weight." Among her recent works are Perhaps We Are All Fictions in the Eye of the Beholder (2023), commissioned by Tate, and The Map (2023). She grew up loving to draw, and though neither of her parents works in the arts, they supported their daughter's passion without reservation.
"I remember, when I was very young, if I wanted some material to draw with, my father would do his best to track it down for me, and he'd take me to different studios to learn different techniques. My mother was hugely encouraging of my studying art too — she'd pin my drawings up at her workplace, so all her customers knew her daughter loved to draw," Xu said, smiling at the memory. Her parents' unconditional support, she said, still moves her. "Without fully understanding how art schools and graduate programs abroad even worked, they scrimped and saved to put me through school in London, and to this day they fully understand what I do."
She also knows plenty of young artists whose families never supported their choice to pursue art, and who nonetheless became artists anyway, through sheer effort and persistence.
"If a person is determined enough, they'll become an artist in the end regardless. But having your family's support makes the whole process so much happier." Contributing writer: Huang Xirui. Editor: Deng Kaili. Images courtesy of the artists' studios and their respective galleries.