Asian artists – Art Spiel

May 8, 2026May 7, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Xinyu Liu’s Fool’s Hour at Art Cake: Finding a home to Carry Onward

Upon entering the exhibition, you are greeted by pieces of various sizes and mediums, full of intricacies and exploration. With the pieces being smaller in size, besides the Ferris wheel, you have to get close to see the small details or the depth of space that opens into a world of its own within each piece. Within the works, Liu offers locations such as cities, darkened spaces, carnivals, and other places of transition. Places that one may find themselves when they are beginning to traverse or transition into someplace new. I appreciated that each work was either on the wall or a shelf, giving each a sense of its own place. The space around the pieces gives them an opportunity to breathe and allows viewers to look closely at one and flow seamlessly into the next.

March 31, 2026April 2, 2026, by Hantian Zhang

The 15th Shanghai Biennale: Does the Flower Hear the Bees?

Botany, I read in Zoë Schlanger’s bestseller The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, is full of groundbreaking discoveries these days (Schlanger 2024). We now know that plants have cellular conduits that allow propagation of electrical charges, that some plants release chemicals in the air to alert neighbors of insects, and that evening primrose increases its nectar’s sweetness when it senses the frequency of the hum of bee wings. While such plant-feeling, plant-talking, and plant-listening are not sustained by the same biological apparatus as ours, the functional parallel is apparent. Perhaps it is time to broaden our understanding of intelligence.

March 30, 2026March 29, 2026, by Michal Gavish

Zhang Huan: The Ash Paintings, at 125 Newbury Gallery

It has been over ten years since the last New York exhibition of the Chinese artist Zhang Huan, known for his edgy political performance pieces documented at the exhibition. What captured me on this visit was his ash paintings, which extended across the entire front hall of the gallery. It feels entirely appropriate that this social activist artist, who later turned to Buddhism, should exhibit these works in New York at such a tense moment. Ash, as a medium, touches on absolute destruction. It carries deep meaning in Buddhist practice, but these days it also pulls toward something harder to name: the daily accumulation of impure ash on the ground of cities being destroyed.

March 11, 2025March 12, 2025, by Riad Miah

Guan-Hong Lu at Nunu Fine Art New York

*The Unbearable Lightness of Being*, 2024 oil on canvas 11 7/8 x 11 7/8 in. Image courtesy of Nunu Fine Art Gallery

Currently on view at Nunu Fine Art’s New York Project Space is View from My Window, a solo exhibition by Taiwanese painter Guan-Hong Lu. The exhibition features over 20 small oil paintings, predominantly 13” x 10” in size, and is housed in the gallery’s lower level—below ground—intensifying the sense of intimacy in both subject matter and conceptual approach. Lu’s subject matter, at first glance, appears as fleeting moments captured in time, but upon closer inspection, they reveal layers of surrealism, irony, and political undertones.

May 19, 2020April 16, 2020, by Melissa Stern

Artists on Coping: ShinYeon Moon

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Macintosh HD:Users:ShinYeon:Desktop:ShinYeon Moon - If I were a house - 110dpi.jpg — “If I were a House…” 8.5 x 11 inches. Digital. 2020

ShinYeon Moon (Shin) is a freelance illustrator based in New York. Moon received her B.F.A. in Fine Arts at the New York University and holds an M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in Illustration as Visual Essay. She has been in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, Austria, and Japan. She taught Design Foundations at Queens College and has received accolades from different illustration publications including 3×3 Magazine, Creative Quarterly, and Latin American Illustration.