Alisan Fine Arts is delighted to announce its return to Shanghai’s West Bund Art & Design Fair in 2025, the centrepiece of the Shanghai Art Week every November. With over four decades of pioneering work in promoting Chinese art globally, the gallery presents 12 artists spanning three generations working in China and overseas, each contributing to an evolving dialogue of Chinese contemporary art in the international context.
Our booth presentation bridges historical and contemporary perspectives, from the first-generation artists like Walasse Ting, who merged Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism influences with his Chinese roots, and the artist-scholar Xie Xiaoze, who developed his intellectual and archival approach to painting and sculpture; Fu Xiaotong uses intricate paper pinhole to create “traditional” landscape compositions; Lin Yan redefines the poetic potential of paper through casting surfaces of old architecture in Xuan paper, preserving vanishing elements like roof tiles and rivets; to post-90s artist Yifan Jiang whose digital-first practices transcend traditional East-West dichotomies in pursuit of individual painting languages.
The cross-border dialogue continues with Wei Ligang, while working in Beijing, incorporates global art influences into his study of calligraphy and universal abstraction. Zhang Yunjia, also Beijing-based, distills his training in the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg and personal experiences into highly ordered, colourful, and surreal geometric and psychological spaces. Justin Lim, an artist who bridges Southeast Asian material culture with the still-life tradition of European painting, builds interior scenes that feel at once tenderly specific and universally resonant. Working in and around Shanghai, Wang Mengsha, Meng Yangyang, and Wang Jie push new boundaries in their respective media – Wang Mengsha through her contemporary reimagining of traditional ink subjects, Meng Yangyang through quiet contemplation of feminine interior spaces on canvas, and Wang Jie through experimental layering of oil, ink, and mixed media in the depiction of traditional Chinese landscape subjects. Our booth also includes the latest paper lighting sculptures by musician-turned-artist Fan Yan, expanding her visual vocabulary on music. Fan’s works from the same series, as well as Lin Yan’s paper installation, are on view at the Shanghai International Paper Art Biennale in November.
Together, these artists challenge and redefine conventional understandings of Chinese art, presenting a dynamic spectrum of practices that reflects the complexity of Chinese cultural identity in a global context. Our booth presentation also marks Fan Yan, Yifan Jiang, Justin Lim, Xie Xiaoze, and Zhang Yunjia’s debut at the art fair, representing significant new opportunities for collectors in the region.
