Zihan Zhou is an artist who creates visual art and explores a variety of media while also writing, educating, and working in the media. Zhou draws deeply from historical iconography, searching for their connection to contemporary contexts. Shifting from traditional painting to collaged images to installations and performances, Zhou’s art strives to produce a more open resonance.
INTERVIEW | Maria Petroff
Maria Petroff is a self-taught figurative artist living between two countries: Russia and Canada. Maria defines her artistic style as critical realism. She likes to paint people who marked our history, whether they are politicians, scientists, artists, philosophers, or fictional characters. The artist gets inspired by today’s world events, trying to thoroughly study the other non-official side of the story.
INTERVIEW | Xingrui Xu
Xingrui Xu (b.1995; China, Kunshan) lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. He expands and develops an engagement with ceramics and the conditions for its contemporary practice. His practice involves ceramics, painting, sculpture, and land art. He reflects on the impact of contemporary art while working to push the boundaries of ceramics in contemporary art and expand its influence.
INTERVIEW | Rodrigo de Toledo
Rodrigo de Toledo is a Brazilian-American multidisciplinary visual artist, graphic designer, and a tenured animation professor at Northern Arizona University. Inspired by ancient mythological archetypes, de Toledo’s work is a fictional mythology with its visual iconography. Employing a primitive pop-surreal graphic style, he investigates questions of identity and spirituality, as well as the media’s effect on personal memory and fantasy.
INTERVIEW | Xuanlin Ye
Xuanlin Ye tasks himself with finding a new genre of visual expression that is representative of the contemporary Asian geopolitical psyche without the influence of Western stereotypes. The two main strands of his work include taking the imagery of traditional Asian tropes and questioning it on the canvas in a humorous or insouciant way through the physical manipulation of paint.
INTERVIEW | Michael Kwong
Painting is just like a bridge for Michael Kwong, linking himself and the outside world together. He can express his attitude toward life and his thought about things, and more importantly, he can interact with people through his artworks. He wants to use his painting to spread a positive power to people and bring a better and prettier world to people through his paintings.
INTERVIEW | Oxana Kovalchuk
Oxana Kovalchuk is an artist from Kazakhstan, currently living and working in New York/New Jersey. Oxana's body of work "Making Fools Pray To God" metamorphoses Christian saints from her private arsenal into contemporary 'deities' revered by the masses, people at large, under new guises. She sees that the spiritual 'links' today have an equivalent in the 'realities' provided us through digital screens.
INTERVIEW | Thomas Behling
Thomas Behling is a German artist, born in Hanover in 1979. Modeled on found historical (authentic) objects, the objects by Thomas Behling pave the way for insight into the deception and transfiguration of appearances. In them, the viewer is confronted with the socio-historical memory and through specific filters and amplifiers with their private and subjective memory.
INTERVIEW | Barry Wolfryd
The work investigates the exploration and exploitation of “human symbology,” the many “forms” of how we relate to ourselves and others. Wolfryd aims to “awaken minds” to fleeting governing laws by virtue of playing pictorial detective through challenging social norms. He creates a tangible environment in which the viewer challenges the perspectives about the qualities of culture and history.