Society

INTERVIEW | Tianyi Zhang

INTERVIEW | Tianyi Zhang

Tianyi Zhang lives and works in Shanghai and Los Angeles. Her work explores patterns of behavior and communication within our over-saturated media and social environment. Through interactive performances, often featuring her own portrait, Zhang emphasizes simple habitual gestures to examine the connection between private and collective experience, cultural pressures, expectations, and identity.

INTERVIEW | Momo

INTERVIEW | Momo

Momo was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and a Ghanaian father. She expresses her identity as a mixed-race person with different backgrounds and her ideology of society behind her work. She explores her unique vision through artistic digital and analog fashion pieces, paintings, and performance shows. Since 2017 she has been living New York City, working as a model.

INTERVIEW | Tianqi Liao

INTERVIEW | Tianqi Liao

Tianqi Liao is a visual artist with a Master of Arts in Arts Administration from Columbia University. As a photographer, she is intrigued by conversations that arise from the friction between societal norms and individual perceptions. Through her lens, she captures the subtle tensions and overt contradictions present in everyday life, to examine themes of conformity and resistance.

INTERVIEW | Xinyu Wo

INTERVIEW | Xinyu Wo

Xinyu Wo is a Chinese visual artist now living in New York. Her art aims to explore the connection between human nature and social reality, triggering viewers to reflect on their inner worlds through visual presentation. By dramatizing images to increase tension and using surrealist techniques to arrange elements, she aims to attract viewers to explore the meanings behind her works. 

INTERVIEW | Wanrong Zhu

INTERVIEW | Wanrong Zhu

Wanrong Zhu is a multimedia visual artist from China and based in London. Her work focuses on the relationship between AI and society. Her latest series, the Dream Series, three distinct works, each delving into different facets of the human psyche—death, inner shadows, and anxiety—drawn from the artist's meticulous collection of 100 recurring dream archives.

INTERVIEW | Yan Yan

INTERVIEW | Yan Yan

Yan Yan is a highly accomplished interdisciplinary designer, focusing her work on critiquing and interpreting the social landscape through the creation of artifacts and narratives infused with critical thinking. For Yan, design is a tool for exploring the truth about the world and the internal universe. Yan's works encourage viewers to reflect on their personal experiences through a systematic and hypothetical lens.

INTERVIEW | Mengjie Mo

INTERVIEW | Mengjie Mo

Mengjie Mo, originally from Yunnan, China, now resides and works in Detroit, U.S. Her life experiences coupled with extensive study and travel,  have instilled in her a critical perspective on societal issues. Mo uses her art as a means to challenge patriarchal norms and blur the boundaries that separate individuals, advocating for a more interconnected and inclusive world.

INTERVIEW | Kangqi Zou

INTERVIEW | Kangqi Zou

Kangqi Zou is a New York-based fashion designer and an esteemed alumna of Parsons School of Design. Her work is recognized for its unique fusion of cultural heritage and contemporary aesthetics, focusing on themes of identity, femininity, and societal roles. Her designs engage in a thoughtful dialogue between form and concept, exploring the nuances of identity and societal roles.

INTERVIEW | Yuehan Hao

INTERVIEW | Yuehan Hao

Yuehan Hao is an artist who focuses on visual creation. Her work takes as its theme the dialectical and contradictory relationship between the stillness of life and the retention of photography. It reflects on the relationship between the mother's death and the changes in family relationships and creates discussions around the correlation between the spiritual consciousness of life and the body's images.

INTERVIEW | Shuwan Chen

INTERVIEW | Shuwan Chen

Shuwan (b.1994) is a visual artist who lives and works in New York City. She is the co-founder of the :iidrr Gallery, located in New York. Her work explores the bridge between physical and digital spaces, objects, and experiences. She uses digital data from an archive of glitched images to make new photographs and sculptures with modeling software and machine learning to explore the vision of the future.

INTERVIEW | Xiaodong Ma

INTERVIEW | Xiaodong Ma

Chicago-based visual artist and hybrid designer Xiaodong Ma was born in Nanjing, China, in 1991. In the interplay between dimensions, Xiaodong Ma found his canvas for exploration. The art practice of translation between 2D and 3D is fertile ground for experimenting with unknown outcomes, challenging viewers to see and experience familiar forms in unexpected ways.

INTERVIEW | Juyi Mao

INTERVIEW | Juyi Mao

Juyi Mao's artistic practice is deeply entrenched in exploring the alchemy of moving images and sound across varied formats. Mao is intrigued by the relationships that exist between people, space, and objects within contemporary life and socio-political contexts. His mixed media art installations are platforms where he dissects the essence of art and media, effectively bridging the gap between the artist and the audience.

INTERVIEW | Milena Jovicevic

INTERVIEW | Milena Jovicevic

Milena Jovicevic is a multidisciplinary artist from Montenegro. Her work is inspired by everyday life situations and paradoxes of contemporary society and the world we live in, that strange place saturated with the media, exaggerated production, and consumption. She works as a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje, Montenegro.

INTERVIEW | Qinru Zhang

INTERVIEW | Qinru Zhang

New York City-based multimedia artist Qinru Zhang has been exploring identity, femininity, and uncanniness using digital mediums, including 3D animation and mixed reality. Through observing society's sexualization of femininity, Zhang appropriates, détourns, and normalizes feminine stereotypes to challenge existing gender norms. She advocates for freedom of choice in identity representations and calls for female empowerment.

INTERVIEW | Fina Ferrara

INTERVIEW | Fina Ferrara

Fina Ferrara is a Mexican performance and video artist. Disturbed by how human boundaries are often penetrated through interactions with others, violence, hatred, and abuse are stepping stones in her performances. Through expelling these emotions, Fina questions life and social standards, highlighting our areas of discomfort. For Fina, performance is an ongoing act of collective self-evolution.

INTERVIEW | Alisa Scetinina - Gaisma

INTERVIEW | Alisa Scetinina - Gaisma

Alisa Scetinina is a performer and musician, born in Latvia and currently based in Berlin, Germany. For Alisa, performance is the way one carries oneself and connects to the inner voice, whether it is through music, dance, film, or any other source of expression. She explores the fluidity and smoothness of our psyche and body, not scared to break the walls that we and our society have built for us.

INTERVIEW | Maya Smira

INTERVIEW | Maya Smira

Maya Smira is a multidisciplinary artist using video, photography, dance, performance & installation. She explores global and interpersonal issues and is interested in land changes, geographic, social and psychological processes. As a traveling artist, the physical space allows her to express new aspects of herself, while also talking about questions in society and the environment.

INTERVIEW | Aiman

INTERVIEW | Aiman

Aiman (1984) is an interdisciplinary artist, living and working in Singapore. His current practice explores philosophical questions, theories, and ideas observed within the context of contemporary discourse. Aiman views his practice as an attempt to inspire others to look inward—a journey of returning to one’s true self—and to reconnect to the ways in which individuals intrinsically relate to one another.

INTERVIEW | Yang Liu

INTERVIEW | Yang Liu

Yang Liu (Lizzy Liu) is a director, producer, and writer based in Los Angeles, California. Liu has written and directed several award-winning films in the past, including A Matter of Time, World Without End, and Tessellation. Her work always includes the elements of critical analysis and radical opinions towards the environment where she lives, and her films create a strong contrast and irony between the content and format.

INTERVIEW | Andrea Gluckman

INTERVIEW | Andrea Gluckman

Andrea Anderson Gluckman is an international award-winning photographer and writer who uses her platforms of academics, activism, and art to witness and leverage the stories of communities devastated by mass violence. She is currently based out of Rochester, New York, where she teaches and works collaboratively with artistic communities on issues of social justice, indigenous truth-telling, and anti-racism work.