Alisan Fine Arts is proud to celebrate our 45th anniversary this year. From the start, the gallery’s mission has been to introduce global audiences to Chinese diaspora artists. For the Dallas Art Fair, we are excited to showcase a selection of artists who represent a diverse cross-section of diasporic artists from around the globe.
This spring, we will be presenting the work of 10 artists: Chinyee, Julie Chang, Fu Xiaotong, Summer Lee, Justin Lim, Leah Ying Lin, Anna Song, Xin Song, Jia Sung, and Kelly Wang. Spanning two generations, this group of artists highlights the rich, ongoing history of Asian diasporic art. Recent institutional interest in their work, both in the U.S. and Europe, is a testament not only to the individual artists’ work, but also to the cultural importance of their collective voices in the contemporary art world.
Based in New York City, Kelly Wang and Jia Sung are multidisciplinary artists who take innovative approaches to their materials. Wang uses traditional Asian materials—such as ink and Xuan paper—and adds industrial ones—including resin, steel wire, and aluminum—to create contemporary landscapes. Sung incorporates textile and embroidery in her paintings, which use images from myth and folklore to tackle contemporary themes.
Xin Song and Fu Xiaotong both take paper as their medium. Xin re-imagines the Chinese papercut tradition, using contemporary magazines and materials to create forms from nature. Fu uses pinpricks in handmade Xuan paper to create undulating landscapes, as well as works that investigate nature on a microscopic scale. Julie Chang is a San Francisco-based artist whose paintings use ancient and contemporary cultural symbols to make visible hidden histories and illustrate the cultural hybridity inherent in the world. Also based in the Bay Area, Summer Lee brings an ongoing body of work tied to her decades-long fascination with birds, whose lives and patterns of migration, in her eyes, are a reflection of the human condition.
Justin Lim is based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His visual language bridges Southeast Asian material culture with the still-life tradition of European painting, building interior scenes that feel at once tenderly specific and universally resonant. In complete contrast, Chinyee was a painter based in upstate New York, known for her abstract, gestural works. Leah Ying Lin and Anna Song create sculptural works. Lin’s molded steel and ceramic works appear as mystical, otherworldly artifacts, while Song’s ceramic pieces are whimsical and subtly anamorphic.
With growing institutional interest in Asian diasporic art, we are excited to continue our decades-long commitment to this diverse and growing group of artists.
