Yana Peel: Artists To Look Out For

Based in Hong Kong, Peel is the co-founder of Intelligence Squared and the London-based foundation Outset Contemporary Art Fund, which has acquired work for over 100 public collections. Peel is also a member of numerous boards, including Tate International Council, Para/Site Art Space, an advisor to St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum as well as being a recipient of the 2010 Montblanc Award for Arts Patronage. Below she gives her top picks of whom she thinks are the most promising artists.

Arse Flowers in Bloom, Ansel Krut
 

Ansel Krut
(b.1959, South Africa)

Krut is an unlikely choice for an emerging artist – a figurative painter in his 50s whose subjects run the gamut from Napoleon on Elba to Arse Flowers in Bloom. His work has been gaining slow but steady acclaim since his first public exhibition in 2004. Recently taken on by London’s respected gallerist Stuart Shave, Krut has found a megaphone for his voice by way of a dialogue with the younger artists of Modern Art’s programme.

---

 

Ming Wong
(b. 1971, Singapore)

The Berlin-based artist creates compelling multimedia, moving-image works that explore the shifting nature of identity and belonging across cultures. I was first transfixed by Ming’s work at Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou. Wong’s installations have been gaining international recognition since he represented Singapore at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. He deserves a place in the canon of great appropriation artists like Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman, not to mention a place on the panel for the annual Intelligence Squared debate at Art HK – Art Must Be Beautiful.  

---

 

 
 
 
  

Shezad Dawood
(b.1974, Britain)

A British multimedia artist of Pakistani descent working in film, photography, sculpture and installation, Dawood draws on references as diverse as Hindi mysticism, European modernism, science fiction and the Wild West. He is erudite and eloquent about his practice, important traits for an artist creating neon works about Allah. He was a deserving winner of last year’s Abraj Capital Art Prize, as well as the Outset funding for a new film to be aired at a solo show at Modern Art Oxford in 2010.

---

 

Pak Sheung Chuen
(b.1977, China)

Pak Sheung Chuen, or Tozer Pak as he is known by the curators at Tate Modern in London who recently brought his work into the collection, is a conceptual and performance artist who has been living in Hong Kong since 1984. Pak represented Hong Kong at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. During his residency that year at the Asia Art Archive, Pak created the work White Library/A Mind Reaching for Emptiness by photocoping all of the blank front and back pages from each of the archive’s collection of Asian art books. The work was later shown in the Louis Vuitton exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum curated by Phil Tinari. This seminal exhibition shone a light on conceptual artists in Hong Kong, whose works have been arguably overshadowed by the market-friendly canvases of contemporary Mainland Chinese painters.

---

 

Olga Chernysheva
(b.1962, Russia)

Chernysheva is a mid-career artist living in Russia, whose subjects are the ordinary people of Moscow living in a post-communist world. She uncovers and chronicles the humour and contradictions that underpin Russian society as it goes through a long period of upheaval. A gift from Outset brought Chernysheva’s work to MOMA in 2008 and her presence in New York will be extended with inclusion in a group show at the New Museum this summer – Ostalgia: Dreams of the East.