Guanyu Xu (b.1993 Beijing) is an artist currently based in Chicago and a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Influenced by the production of ideology in American visual culture and a conservative familial upbringing in China, Xu’s practice extends from examining the production of power in photography to the question of personal freedom and its relationship to political regimes. He negotiates this from the perspective as a Chinese gay man. In his work, Xu migrates between mediums like photography, new media, and installation. These movements operate similarly to his displaced and fractured identity.
His works have been exhibited and screened internationally including the Aperture Foundation, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; New Orlean Museum of Art, New Orleans; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Wesleyan University, Middletown; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Mint Museum, Charlotte; 36th Kasseler Dokfest, Germany, and others. His work can be found in public collections including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, and New Orleans Museum of Art.
Han Qian received her B.A in Accademia di belle arti di Roma, Italy and M.A in École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris, Paris, France.
Han Qian's work as well as reflecting on individual perception and identity memory through multiple times and the threads of history. Attempting to present her creative projects as a constant journey between the past and the present, searching for the possibility of symbiosis and dialogues with the external world and inner experience. The artist often works with her video through photographs, documents as well as writing, the act of collecting and textual writing is a recurring metaphor in her creative practice, and the search for different perceptions of source time always pulls in her writing. The artist employs various mediums such as video, installation, performance, and text. Her current work revolves around the context of her three-generational family history, examining the genealogy of natural resources, the political discourses behind this historical narrative, and the fates of the individuals who inhabited it.
José Quintanar is an artist, cartoonist, publisher, and educator currently pursuing a PhD at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. His work explores drawing as a game or set of rules applied in artist books and installations. Quintanar has released several full-length comics and artists’ books including Conociendo a Jari, Grundfunken, Fartlek, and Culto Charles. His drawings have been published by The New York Times, Vice, Esquire, Fantagraphics, and others, and his work has been exhibited in galleries in New York, Paris, London, Rotterdam, Madrid, Porto, and Berlin. Along with artist Ruohong Wu, Quintanar runs Ruja Press, publishing the architectural, artistic, and curatorial interests and materials of the studio Ruja Office.
Kanthy Peng is an artist from China who works primarily with photography, film, and installation. She received her MFA degree from the Yale School of Art in 2019 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in the same year. She is currently an artist-in-residence in 2020-2021 at Jan van Eyck Academie.
Karel Martens is a Dutch designer and teacher. Since graduating from the Arnhem Academy of Art and Industrial Arts in 1961, Martens has worked as a freelance graphic designer for the publishers Van Loghum Slaterus, the Socialistiese Uitgeverij Nijmegen (SUN), the Netherlands national postal service, and other clients. He has designed the architecture journal OASE and glass facades for the Philharmonie in Haarlem.
Martens won the H.N. Werkman Prize (1993) for the design of Oase, the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Art (1996), the Gold Medal at the Leipzig Book Fair (1998), the Gerrit Noordzij Prize (2012), and several other distinctions. He taught at the Arnhem Academy of Art and Industrial Arts as well as the Jan van Eyck Academie and has been a visiting critic at the Yale School of Art since 1997. Martens co-founded the Werkplaats Typographie program with Wigger Bierma in 1998.
Menglan Chen is a Ph.D. student in East Asian Film and Media studies at Harvard University. Her previous research focused on the intersection of photography with visual ethnography, ethnic representation, and scientific image making in early 20th century China. More broadly, she is interested in the changing status of the image in Chinese visual culture, as well as the intersection of vision, episteme and politics. Menglan received her B.A. in Anthropology from Tufts University and her M. A. from Harvard University's Regional Studies East Asia program.
Han Mengyun (b.1989, Wuhan, China) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, installation, text and video, as well as nodes of their intersections. Han primarily works with painting that combines various traditions by way of integrating craft and installations inspired by religious and vernacular architectures. Han received her B. A in Studio Art from Bard College in the US in 2012 and has pursued the study of Sanskrit at various institutions such as Kyoto University before she completed her MFA at the University of Oxford with a research focus on Classical Indology and Indian aesthetic theories in 2018. She has worked at the British Museum and has previously taught at Rutgers University. Recent exhibitions: “The Glass Bead Game” (Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland, 2022); “The Pavilion of Three Mirrors” (Ad-Diriyah Biennale: Feeling the Stones, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 2021); “The Dwelling Place of the Other in Me” (Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2021) etc.
While working as a photographer in Paris, Michel Auder was drafted into the Algerian War. After being involved with the Zanzibar Group in France at the close of the 1960s, Auder continued to make films and photographs in New York City. Auder’s work captured iconic and imaginative artists such as Viva, Andy Warhol, Candy Darling, and Cindy Sherman. The artist has continued to use images and footage from his archive as well as create new work in his personal, up-close, diaristic approach.
Auder participated in documenta 13 in 2012, documenta 14 in 2017, and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. He has had solo exhibitions at the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. His work has been exhibited at the Anthology Film Archives, the Centre for Contemporary Images, and the Berlin, London, and Copenhagen international film festivals. Auder was appointed critic at the Yale School of Art in 2009.
Shin Shin is Haeok Shin and Donghyeok Shin, a graphic design studio based in Seoul, Korea. Haeok is interested in interweaving and threading a strand of texts, images and pages within the structure of a book, she focuses on the observed relationships in them, while Donghyeok’s interest lies in contemplating the ways of renewing the history, styles, conventions, traditions, and theory of graphic design, in the context of ‘here, now.’ They both studied at Dankook University and Haeok graduated from the Yale School of Art with an MFA in Graphic Design in 2018. They have worked together in the fields of art and culture area, collaborating in partnership with curators, editors, artists and institutions since 2008. They are continuing in parallel with self-initiated projects as well as participating in various exhibitions, while teaching at Universities and synchronizing their interest with students. In 2020, they set up their own publisher, Hwawon, as an imprint of Mediabus to focus on the performative aspect of design practice in which design methodology crystallizes into the structure and materiality of an object.
Somnath Bhatt is a designer, artist, and writer who lives between Ahmedabad and New York City. His work has been shown at MoMA PS1, Art Week Dubai, the ICA London, and Mécènes du Sud Montpellier-Sète, among other venues. Selected clients include Instagram, the New York Times, Reebok, HYEIN SEO, and the musician Nicolás Jaar. He also works as a contributing editor at MOLD Magazine and AIGA Eye on Design. Somnath believes in the power of the unseen, the chaos of myths, and that labor has the right to all that it creates.
Zhongkai Li received their MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2019. Li’s work explores the interoperability of impermanence, prototypes, iterations, contemplative image-making, and garden studies. His work has been shown at Maharam, New York, the French International Film and Art Book Festival, the Scotland Graphic Design Festival, the Golden Bee Global Biennale of Graphic Design, the New Haven International Film Festival, the CICA Museum, Korea, the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Nanshan Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Zhongkai Li received the Sanyu Scholarship from the Andrea Frank Foundation, the Yale School of Art Scholarship, and the First-Class Scholarship from the Central Academy of Fine Arts.