No, your eyes are not playing tricks on you; Lee’s paintings are. The South Korean artist’s hyper-realistic trompe-l’oeil paintings in the Brush series depicts larger-than-life Chinese brushes splotching, swiping, and bleeding black ink onto the canvas. Done in oil on Korean rice paper, his works form a commentary on the pervasive influence of traditional Chinese painting on contemporary art in Asia. As the viewer is drawn in to contemplate every strand of fibre in the brush and the swirls of wood grain on the handle, a connection between traditional techniques and modern perspectives is made.

Lee’s love for art blossomed during art lessons in middle school, but the fun stopped when he decided to take his passion further with formal art education in high school and graduate school. By the time it became his career, it had become a tedious full-time job. Childlike, colourful and playful, the signature faux-naif style he uses in his sculptures today stems from a wish to rediscover and recapture the joy that art brings him.

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Rubinstein’s work always promises three times the viewing pleasure. Using a special technique, he creates three variations of every painting on a single canvas, each variation revealing itself as the viewer changes viewing angles. The art almost seems to move with the viewer and takes on an animated quality. Growing up as a child in Paris in the 1960s, Rubinstein was strongly influenced by the big names in optical and kinetic art –Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, and Yaacov Agam. His style, however, leans closer to pop art à la Andy Warhol, and his preferred subjects are icons of the second half of the twentieth century.

“Flat Depth” isn’t an oxymoron, but a logical progression of art, according to American artist Rousso. The concept is one that he has been perfecting for his whole career. It strives to either transform a flat object into a three-dimensional sculpture, or a collapse a three-dimensional object into a flat one. Hyper-realistic and hyper-sized, Rousso’s sculptures are achieved by a complex combination of techniques including painting, welding, and digital manipulation.

Before he ever wielded a paintbrush, Cadenas was welding iron. The heir of Ferros d’Art Cadenas, a renowned foundry with almost three hundred years of history in Girona, Spain, he shot to fame on Instagram after a number of videos of his dual-image kinetic paintings went viral. Completely self-taught, Cadenas’ technique involves painstakingly applying vertical ridges to the canvas before two separate portraits are painting on either side of the ridges. As the viewer moves from right to left or vice versa, the portrait morphs from one subject to the other.

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