JURY

Rachel Howard is a British painter, who has exhibited internationally for the past 3 decades and whose works are held in public and private collections worldwide. Born in County Durham, United Kingdom, in 1969, she graduated from Goldsmith's College in 1991 with a degree in Fine Art and Critical Theory. Howard plays with the tensions between control and chaos, order and entropy, making and unmaking, beauty and destruction. She revels in the sheer joy of her material. The intense physicality of her process grapples with notions of uncertainty, fragility, beauty and horror. Religion, repetition, mortality, madness and violence are recurring themes in the work. A student of both Fine Art and Art History, the use of the endless portal of the internet, as a fresh source of constant inspiration and a dialogue with the world around is as essential as the art of the past.

Dr. Simon Groom is Director, Modern and Contemporary Art, National Galleries of Scotland. Graduated with a degree in English Literature from Edinburgh University, before spending a year living and working in Japan and three years in Italy, where he taught English literature and critical theory at Florence University. He returned to London to complete an MA and a PhD in Art History, with a thesis on postwar art in France, Japan and Italy, at the Courtauld Institute of Art. For three years he worked as the curator at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, where he curated, amongst other shows, the first UK retrospective of the Japanese group, Mono-ha. In 2003, he was appointed Head of Exhibitions at Tate Liverpool, where he curated numerous exhibitions of modern and contemporary international art, including the groundbreaking “The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China”. In November 2007 he was appointed Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. In that time he has curated numerous exhibitions, including in 2024 “Fantastic Visions: 100 Years of Surrealism” at Museum of Art Pudong, and sought to establish and develop the profile of the Gallery in its promotion of modern and contemporary art, and to build and promote Scotland’s reputation as a leading international centre for contemporary art.

Sophie von Hellermann was born in 1975, Munich. She received her BFA from Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf and an MFA from Royal College of Art, London. She has held numerous solo exhibitions in cities in UK, Germany and France since 1999. Her paintings recall the look of fables, legends, and traditional stories that are imbued with the workings of her subconscious rather than the content of existing images. Her romantic, pastel-washed canvases are often installed to suggest complex narrative threads. Von Hellermann applies pure pigment directly onto unprimed canvas, her use of broad-brushed washes imbues a sense of weightlessness to her pictures. Von Hellermann’s paintings draw upon current affairs as often and as fluidly as they borrow from the imagery of classical mythology and literature to create expansive imaginary places. In subject matter and style, von Hellermann tests imagination against reality.

Wang Tiande (born in 1960) graduated in 1988 from the Department of Chinese China Academy of Art (Now China Academy of Art) . He obtained his Phd in calligraphy from the Academy and is currently a professor of Chinese Fudan University. Wang Tiande is well-known for his revolutionary innovation of traditional Chinese art, and is regarded as one of the most important artists in the history of contemporary Chinese ink painting. Wang Tiande creates his own unique artistic language with the technique of ink-wash landscape painting superimposed with smoke-hot or fragrant-hot painting. Later, he combined his landscape creation with his collection of ancient monuments and rubbings, seeking connection and dialogue between the past and the present, destruction and creation, immutability and transience. He held solo and group exhibitions in well-known galleries at home and abroad, as well as important museums and academic institutions. Works by Wang Tiande have also been collected by well-known international art museums and academic institutions.

Yang Fudong was born in Beijing in 1971, and now lives and works in Shanghai. He graduated from the Department of Oil Painting, China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. He is among the most successful and influential Chinese artists today. Yang has started to create video works since late 1990s. His works form a unique cultural visual interpretation through multiple cultural perspectives interlaced with experiences of space and time with photograph, painting, film and installation. They are all characterised by multi-perspectives, exploring the structures and forms of identities in myths, personal memories and life experiences. Each work could be considered as both a dramatic lived experience and a challenge. Yang Fudong has participated in several prestigious international art events including Documenta in Kassel (2002), the Venice Biennale (2003/2007), Shanghai Biennale (2002/2004/2010/2018), the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2006) and the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013) etc.