West Bund Art & Design Fair 2025

Kohei NAWA (b. 1975) presents a multilateral work based on his diverse practice, which examines the relationship between nature and artificiality, paying attention to the association between the individual and the whole. In the world of the artist, organic forms invariably become stylized and artificial, displaying the parts accumulated together as a whole, like cells, creating complex and dynamic structures. The series of sculptures entitled PixCell, a combination of the unit ‘Pixel’ that represents the accuracy of the image in the digital era and ‘Cell’ that refers to biological cells, highlights phenomenological questions about the nature of the object. The artist dismantles and combines color, texture, and shape using various materials such as carbon, silicon, crystal, gold, and aluminum. Direction is created by setting the canvas upright and tilting it at a 15-degree angle, then allowing paint with carefully adjusted viscosity to slowly flow down its surface. Rather than being drawn by the NAWA’s hand, the lines emerge as gravity — a natural force — pulls the ink downward, forming dots, lines, and planes. The work visualizes the invisible force of gravity and reveals the point where human intention intersects with the laws of nature. It can be seen as a painting that traces the pictorial marks created by this fundamental natural force.

Kohei NAWA was born in Osaka, Japan in 1975. He received his BFA in 1998, MFA in 2000, and PhD in 2003, majoring in sculpture at Kyoto City University of Arts, Kyoto, Japan. He has held solo exhibitions at prestigious art institutions including SCAI THE BATHHOUSE  (Tokyo, Japan, 2025; 2021; 2018; 2015; 2010), Galerie Vera Munro (Hamburg, Germany, 2024; 2009), ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI (Shanghai, China, 2022; 2017; 2015), Pace Gallery (New York; Palo Alto, US, 2022), Louvre Museum (Paris, France, 2018), Kirhishima Open-Air Museum (Kagoshima, Japan, 2013), ARARIO GALLERY CHEONAN (Cheonan, Korea, 2013; 2012), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan, 2011), Joan Miro Foundation (Barcelona, Spain, 2008), Ierimonti Gallery (Milano, Italy, 2007), and more. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Pace Gallery (Tokyo, Japan, 2024), Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (Queensland, Australia, 2024), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan, 2023; 2014), National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C., US, 2019), Centre Pompidou-Metz(Metz, France, 2017), F-Art House (Okayama, Japan, 2016), ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany, 2016), La Maison de la Culture du Japon a Paris (Paris, France, 2015), ArtScience Museum (Singapore, 2015), and more. He won the 32nd Kyoto Art Culture Award in 2019, and was selected as the "50 Next Most Collectible Artists" by Art+Auction in 2012. His works are a part of world's leading art institutions’ collections, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Mori Art Museum, Leeum Museum of Art, and ARARIO MUSEUM. Kohei NAWA is a professor at Kyoto University of the Arts and continues his artistic career as a director of SANDWICH, an art, design, and architectural creation platform. 

  LEE Seung Ae (b. 1979) conveys intangible elements such as light, sound, intimate emotions, and unseen faith and spirit through her art. Primarily using graphite and paper, she extends her paintings into installations and stop-motion animations, pushing beyond traditional boundaries. LEE Seung Ae employs refined natural materials like wood and minerals, along with everyday objects rich with her personal memories. She uses frottage on their surfaces as a cornerstone of her paintings, aiming to uncover the inherent vitality within subjects that often reside quietly on life's periphery. All static objects are essentially manifestations of the vibrant natural world. Her intention to capture and represent the spirit inherent in everything showcases an aspect deeply aligned with the Eastern naturalistic worldview. Through her artistry of integrating intangible spiritual elements within her artworks, LEE aspires to connect with a grander universe beyond the visible realm. The unique texture, hue, aroma, and characteristics of graphite perfectly resonate with her creative approach and thematic nuances. The pencil, a basic drawing tool, reveals the artist's physical gestures, depositing varying traces of graphite on paper based on the applied pressure, thereby making her bodily actions perceptible. Organic sounds from elements like water, wind, fire, and smoke seamlessly complement the visuals. Over the past decade, LEE has consistently produced video works derived from paintings. Through a process of drawing and erasing repeatedly, she captures these painted scenes with a digital camera, transforming them into sequential animations. The images in her videos flow and evolve, expanding the narrative, and eventually come full circle to their origins. Her video works serve as a medium to visualize imaginary realms. Not restricted to a fixed narrative structure, she intuitively alters images in succession, effectively showcasing her process by incorporating time within her frames.

  LEE Seung Ae was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1979. She received her MFA at Royal College of Art, London, UK in 2016 and currently works across London and Seoul. The artist has held solo exhibitions at various institutions such as Art Space Boan 1 at Boan 1942 (Seoul, Korea, 2024), ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL (Seoul, Korea, 2023; 2012), Chapter II (Seoul, Korea, 2020), Amado Art Space (Seoul, Korea, 2018), De Art Center (Beijing, China, 2018), Korean Cultural Center (London, UK, 2018), Marlborough Fine Art (London, UK, 2017) in 2017, Doosan Gallery (Seoul, Korea, 2011), and moreShe participated in the The 24th SongEun Art Award (2024), The 14th Gwangju Biennale: Soft and Weak like Water (2023), The 1st Jinan International Biennale: Power of Harmony (2020), Theme Exhibition of the 4th Guangzhou Triennale: The Unseen (2012), and also, group exhibitions held at Malmitalo (Helsinki, Finland, 2025), ARARIO GALLERY (Shanghai, China, 2025, Cheonan, Korea, 2020; 2010; 2006, Seoul, Korea, 2011; 2010), Doosan Gallery (Seoul, Korea, 2022), Palazzon Ca’Zanardi (Venice, Italy, 2017), Marlborough Fine Art (London, UK, 2016), and more. LEE was awarded the Valerie Beston Artists’ Trust Prize (London, UK) in 2016, and GUCCI Young Artist Grant (Seoul, Korea) in 2013. Her works are acquired by renowned institutions such as Seoul Museum of Art (Korea), and ARARIO MUSEUM (Korea).

  CHEN Xiaozhi (b. 1980, Hunan) lives and works between Paris and Shanghai. Her practice moves fluidly between the “past” and the “future,” “creation” and “being created,” weaving together painting, sound installation, and sculpture to explore perception, memory, and the transformation of energy. Having worked extensively in art conservation, Chen regards restoration as a “science of seeing,” a method that shapes her temporal and sensory understanding of the world. Her works combine traditional materials such as gold leaf, ramie, and glass fragments with modern industrial residues—where gold leaf becomes both a sacred and eternal medium, a bridge between spirit and matter. Far from nostalgia, Chen’s engagement with ancient media seeks to rebuild emotional resonance within fragmented contemporary life, tracing how energy circulates across time. Through repetitive, meditative labor, she balances the mechanical and the transcendental, re-forging cultural remnants to open fissures in our accelerated era, where viewers may glimpse folds of time and the emergence of unseen possibilities.

  CHEN Xiaozhi has held solo exhibitions including Carte Blanche – Réminiscence d’un futur antérieur at 743 ART Lab in Shanghai (2025) and The Time of Curiosity at Right Art Museum, Shanghai (2024). She presented double exhibitions in Paris, including Entre chien et loup: Chaotic Forest at OVISION Art Space (2022) and an artist jewelry collaboration with Vissi d’Arte at La Manufacture Art Space (2022). Her work has appeared in group exhibitions such as the 11th Art Shenzhen “Qianhe Art Space Group Exhibition” (2024), the Shenyang “Une voie perpétuelle – A Century of Franco-Chinese Art” exhibition (2024), PODADA group exhibition Verre églomisé Painting in Asnières-sur-Seine, France (2021), L’art s’invite in Asnières-sur-Seine (2021), and La Parade animale at Château d’Asnières, France (2019). Her works are held in public and private collections, including the public installation Harmony with the Light and Dust for the Beijing EP YAYING project by FRANCLIN AZZI ARCHITECTE, Dust Mirror Series – A Vacant Space in the former residence of Lu Xiaoman in Shanghai, and in international collections such as Vissi d’Arte Gallery in Paris and Atelier Yô Art Space in Avignon.

  LIM Nosik (b. 1989) explores the act of witnessing the invisible—those entities that exist within and beyond the world perceived through the physical body—through the process of painting. In his recent practice, LIM visualizes the spatial and temporal volume between himself and his subjects through a process of layering: oil-painted landscapes are blurred and reworked with transparent oil pastel. By softening visible forms through this visual medium, he evokes the presence of what cannot be seen. Across multiple canvases, recurring images of the artist himself shift between the roles of subject and object, the one who sees and the one being seen. These fragmented self-portraits, dispersed like shards across different frames, function both as reflections—mirror images that extend beyond the boundaries of the body—and as reversed landscapes observed through the lens of painting. Shrouded in a mist that preserves the tension between viewer and viewed, they trace the ambiguity of presence. The gaze, initially centered on the artist’s own canvas, gradually transitions—from the painter, to the subject, and finally to the audience.

  LIM Nosik was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1989. He received his BFA in Oriental Painting at Hongik University in 2015, and MFA in Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts at Korea National University of Arts in 2017. He has held solo exhibitions at various institutions such as Space Willing N Dealing (Seoul, Korea, 2025), Space Æfter (Seoul, Korea, 2024), Kumho Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea, 2023), Project Space Sarubia (Seoul, Korea, 2023), Incheon Art Platform (Incheon, Korea, 2020), Artspace Boan 2 (Seoul, Korea, 2020) and Hapjungjigu (Seoul, Korea, 2017), as well as group exhibitions held at Hite Collection (Seoul, Korea, 2025), König Telegraphenamt (Berlin, Germany, 2025), ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL (Seoul, Korea, 2024), SongEun (Seoul, Korea, 2023), Ilmin Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea, 2023), Art Center White Block (Seoul, Korea, 2022), SFAC Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (Seoul, Korea, 2021), Amado Art Space (Seoul, Korea, 2020), and more. He was the artist-in-residence at the SeMA Nanji Residency (Seoul, Korea) in 2019, Incheon Art Platform (Incheon, Korea) in 2020, and the SFAC Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (Seoul, Korea) in 2021. The artist gained attention for being selected in the OCI Young Creatives in 2015, and Kumho Young Artist 2022. In 2025, he was awarded the Heo Baek‑ryeon Art Prize as part of the Gwangju Culture and Arts Awards. His works are collected by institutions such as the Seoul Museum of Art, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Art Bank, OCI Museum, Ilmin Museum of Art, ARARIO MUSEUM and more.

  SHAO Fengtian (b. 1994) was born in Jiangsu, China. He currently lives and works in Nanjing. Seeing himself as a landscape painter, Shao redefines the current “nature” by practising with digital imaging software and cartographic artificial intelligence, and activates his judgment on painting from within. Shao’s recent exhibitions and projects include: Island of Abundance, Ray Gallery, Hangzhou, 2025; New Clothes, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, 2024; L'EXTASE, Building 23 x Imagokinetics, Hangzhou, 2024; Screen Depth: Digital Innovation in Painting, Guangdong Contemporary Art Center, 2024; Ode to the Unexpected, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, 2024; The Logic of Image, Sailing Space, Shanghai, 2023.