Autor/-in: Liu Ye

Beijing-born painter Liu Ye (b. 1964) combines abstraction and figuration to create bold, meditative paintings that investigate the intersections of history and representation through a distinct vocabulary that transcends traditional Eastern and Western art-historical categories. Drawing on both his childhood memories of China and his early education in Europe, the artist's carefully balanced, methodical compositions play on perspective and ways of seeing, while also referencing a diverse range of aesthetic, literary, and cultural sources. Among these are the fairy-tale worlds of Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll; literature by Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabokov; and modernist painting, architecture, and design, from Balthus to the Bauhaus. These various points of reference have inspired Liu's artistic output for more than twenty-five years, resulting in a body of work that is at once rich in its historical quotations and singularly his own.

Zhu Zhu is a poet, curator, and art critic. He is the author of various collections of poetry, prose, and art criticism, including Blue Smoke (2004) and The Wild Great Wall (2018). He is the recipient of the Anne Kao Poetry Prize and the Chinese Contemporary Art Award for criticism.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, Senior Advisor at LUMA Arles, and Senior Artistic Advisor at The Shed in New York. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions, his recent shows include IT'S URGENT at LUMA Arles (2019-2021), and Enzo Mari at Triennale Milano (2020). Obrist's recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), Mondialité (2017), Somewhere Totally Else (2018) The Athens Dialogues (2018), An Exhibition Always Hides Another Exhibition (2019), Maria Lassnig: Letters (2020), Entrevistas Brasileiras: Volume 2 (2020), The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021), and 140 Ideas for Planet Earth (2021).