Subcurrents

Artists

Guangyao CHEN

Guangyao CHEN (b.1996, China) currently lives and works in Beijing. He received his bachelor’s degree in 2021 and master’s degree in 2024 from Studio One, Department of Sculpture, Central Academy of Fine Arts. CHEN employs nonlinear narratives in his sculptural practice to explore the tension between reality and dreams. Through humorous and symbolic expression, he transforms personal experiences of individual growth into fragmented, dreamlike scenes, which he reassembles. By deconstructing these elements spatially, he reflects on the dialogue between dream and reality. The intoxication of the dream mirrors the dilemmas of reality—his figures, whether clasping hands or resting in a daze, embody both the silence of dreams and the contemplation of life.

Zihan CUI

Zihan CUI (b. 2000, China) is pursuing an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, following a BFA in Oil Painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (2024). CUI’s practice investigates the often unnoticed influence of algorithms and their subtle control over individuals. He views digital life as fragmented, with daily experiences parsed into symbolic details. This anxiety drives him to reimagine everyday scenes through estrangement, using 3D scanning and animation to depict floating objects and surreal landscapes. His work reflects the tension between systemic control and conflicting human desires. Drawing from multiple disciplines, he highlights underlying structures in daily life. For CUI, algorithms act as invisible shaping forces, leading people into cycles of consumption, rendering contemporary existence fragmented and overstimulated.

Yinuo LI

Yinuo LI (b. 2000, China) is a London-based artist. She completed her MFA in Painting at the Royal College of Art and obtained her BFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Her works transform the canvas into a living, organic entity where space and animated dimensions are gently balanced. Each composition unfolds through narratives between objects, with forms defined, blurred, and reprocessed to achieve harmony. Navigating cracks in an irregular world, she blurs boundaries between reality and illusion. Her layered paint mimics infinite textures of memory, allowing microscopic and macroscopic elements to coexist. She views painting as translation, transmuting the internal and literal into the external and visual. Her work encourages sensation, memory, and psychological depth where metaphor slips into abstraction, logic yields to poetic resonance, and the unconscious emerges within a painted terrain.

Marc TRUCKENBRODT

Marc Truckenbrodt (b. 1998, Jena, Germany) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and is pursuing an MFA at HFBK Hamburg. He lives and works between Hamburg and Hangzhou. His practice merges formal, epic storytelling with a poetic aim to create dynamic, layered relationships. Rooted in emotions, experiences, and literature, which he sees as both means and end, his work explores the search for individual identity across painting, drawing, printmaking, and comics. Truckenbrodt’s paintings emerge from his perception of the present and its shaping interrelations. He regards them as symbolic narratives—poetic expressions that gently extend beyond rationality to reflect on life’s complexities. He explores whether individuals can retain autonomy within constructed systems of power and ideology.

Ziang YIN

Ziang YIN (b. 1997, Anhui, China) graduated from the Affiliated High School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2018 and is currently studying at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. His paintings move between refined and mundane, compassionate and optimistic, blending personal memories, art history, and contemporary imagery to depict his self-aware world. Recently, animals and plants have become key motifs, symbolizing memories and stories. YIN’s work explores the space between abstraction and figuration, inviting both aesthetic pleasure and reflective introspection. As he says, “As twilight falls, with the whisper of nocturnal creatures, I chase the intoxication of Bacchus and the lucidity of Apollo.”

Curator

Fanfan Yuxuan Fan