Deng Yun

After quitting university, Deng Yun began taking photos and writing. His artworks, often posted on WeChat and public blogs, focus on perceiving daily micro-scenes with sensuality. His creative method is relatively free and packed with emotion. He is most happy when exploring delicate connections between different forms of art, including photography, poetry and music.

Feng Li

Feng Li, a graduate of Chinese medicine, practices photography both as a civil servant for the provincial Department of Communication and as an independent artist. He constantly gravitates between official imagery and his personal work.

Feng Li’s photos are like a series of fortuitous encounters with an unlikely cast of reality mostly met in the streets of Chengdu. Since 2005, he constantly nourishes a single and unique series, using a few formal constraints (vertical format, use of flashlight): White Night. In 2017, he won the Jimei x Arles Discovery Award during the third year of this festival.

Read our interview with Feng Li

Guo Yingguang

Born in 1983 in China and trained in the UK (London College of Communication University of the Arts), Guo Yingguang began her photographic career with Reuters, China Daily, and other media groups.

Her artistic work revolves around social problems in contemporary China: « leftover women » (an expression for women who are single after 30), arranged marriages, and pseudo-intimacy between husbands and wives who are the victims of such marriages. Her combination of photography and printmaking aims for melancholia, delicacy, and abstraction.

In 2017, Guo Yingguang was awarded the Jimei x Arles-Madame Figaro Women Photographers award, the first ever award dedicated to women photographers in China.

Guo Yingguang’s website

Read our interview with Guo Yingguang

Jiang Yuxin

Jiang Yuxin defines herself as an artist and writer, and co-founded along with other artists a non-profit festival called pic.london. Her work is a mix of photography, video, text, performance and installation.

Her practice deals with the politics in everyday life, ideology in linguistic and visual forms, often starting with a psychological approach. In her series Five Events and Some Observations on Identity (2015-2017), she questions her identity as a Chinese immigrant in London, and more broadly the issue of immigration.

By magnifying the micro in the vernacular, the work speaks out loud the unease possibly commonly shared and asks: how do we live with identities that we don’t necessarily identify with?

Jiang Yuxin’s website

Shao Wenhuan

Born in 1971 in Hotan (Xinjiang), Shao Wenhuan is a graduate from Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Dijon (France) and the China Academy of Art (Hangzhou), where he teaches today.

Shao Wenhuan creates works inspired by traditional Chinese painting. He blends photography and painting to create metaphysical artworks inspired by nature.

Shao Wenhua’s Instagram

Shao Wenhua’s artwork was shown at ICICLE Cultural Space in Paris for the “ROCKS!” exhibition

The Real

Born after 1990, the three members of this artist collective The Real(Wang Mengfan, Da Zhuang and He Shaotong) come from the live performance world. They live between Germany and China.

They create photo and video works derived from their stage work (dance and theatre). In the series Dance theatre of real people, they play with the idea of dance video, inspired by the collaboration between American dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham and photographer Elliot Caplan.

Siu Waihang

Siu Wai Hang was born in 1986 in Hong Kong from a father who fled China in 1970s.

Hong Kong is his preferred subject, particularly its relation with China. Siu Wai Hang conceives outstanding photographic installations: portraits printed on collages made of paper receipts (Customers series), automatic flipboards showing images of military barracks near Hong Kong (The Elusive), polluted plant specimens photographed using a standardized typological photography methodology (The Roadsider), landscape photos of the illuminated Hong Kong skyline as seen from China (Inside Outland), stretched photographic films showing crowds (X).

His exhibition at Jimei x Arles was distinguished by the jury with a Special Mention award

Siu Wai Hang’s website

Sun Yanchu

A lonely experimenter, Sun Yanchu’s photos and videos melt together his personal life and his understanding of photography, painting and image.

His series Obsessed (2004-2011) and Colour (2006-2016) are concerned with loneliness and intimacy. In Ficciones, he uses photos gathered in flea markets and transforms them using a combination of gold foil, watercolor, acrylic, sometimes soy sauce, giving these images a new life.

Sun Yanchu’s Instagram

Yu Feifei

Born in 1988 in Guangzhou, Yu Feifei studied at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA, Beijing) and at the Royal College of Art (London).

From the material world to the virtual world, her work redefines the boundaries between 3D works and 2D images, real space and virtual space, moving and still images.

Yu Feifei’s works have been exhibited in China and abroad (London, Dubai, Cairo) and collected by the Victoria & Albert Museum (London).

Yu Mo

Yu Mo practices calligraphy and photography daily, repeating the same gestures and accumulating images.

In his project The Story of A Small Town, he has been documenting for the past ten years the daily life of small Chinese towns and provinces where ethnic minorities live (Yunnan, Xinjiang, Fujian, Guizhou…). The « small town » series tells the story of China, a country whose rural population shall reach 600 million by 2050.