Zhao Fang

Shuai Mei

Ebbing and flowing between modernity and antiquity, Shuai Mei blends the contradictory sides of the modern woman into her willowy figurative representations. Aptly dressing her figures in the soft fabrics of modern clothing and classical costume, lyrical insight is ushers the viewer in through the closed doors of the female boudoir. Alluding to conversation, Shuai Mei's women flirt with coy reticence in the luminescent glow of shards of natural sunlight seeping into the open courtyards. An implicit sexuality is whimsically drawn into her scenes as the viewer is invited to glance furtively at her figure's tiny hands and feet that shy away from direct view. In keeping with the Asian female aesthetic, the artist indicates towards temporality through costume and furniture style, yet hints towards the decorous nature of external accessory. Deploying screens, long winding paths, open windows, and mirrors as a motif evoke the Freudian subconscious secretive and indirect nature of the demure feminine sensibility. Her figures are lean and supple, composed in perfect posture, evoking a nostalgic and idealized memory of days yonder. Shuai Mei's craftsmanship with egg tempera on canvas is sentimental and sensitive; her desire to remember the contradictions of memory imbues her scenes with melancholic blitheness.

Making a dramatic debut as one of our latest emerging talents, Shen Hua is a promising new artist whose style reaches for ideal - artistic, and personal, both. Shen Hua's story is a poignant reminder of class divisions and adversity that had to be overcome during his youth; his story is one of determination and artistic ambition. Mentored by renowned artist Luo Zhong Li at the prominent Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Shen Hua at the age of 33 is pursuing an illustrious career as a full time artist. The tuition of his 3-year Masters degree will be sponsored entirely by Schoeni Art Gallery, in celebration of the promise and potential that we see in Shen Hua's work.

Characterised by his linear rows of duplicated human heads, Chen Yu favours his own take on the repetitive balance of Political Pop Art and Rouge Cynicism representation. Stylistically counterbalancing the spatial elements of repetition, he alleviates visual congestion by infusing space and wit into his subject through vista tightened and relaxed in binary opposition. Targeting a particular social reference, the inner commentary of Chen Yu's art is at times bordering on farcical satire. Held within his repetitive framework is the amassed central identity of fashion and trend, forming a pseudo-Jungian archetype against a politically charged landscape. Emerging out of an "era where independent individuals and the liberalisation of thought are advocated", Chen Yu questions the standardised self and his monotonous replication of the "self" lends an ironical twist to the one faltering exception in each piece; a sly wink, or a vague variation in facial expression and tone. In someway self-consciously aware and questioning, Chen Yu is somehow abstract and aloof. Chen Yu endorses the personality through an oblique confrontation to individual integrity. Strengthened by explicit symbolism of media advertising and recent political events, the human is pitted against the social to question our acquiescence to a social norm. Chen Yu visually extrapolates the implications of our 'social' selves with a poetic lyricism that resumes the social commentary of China's recent history.