China’s Rising Artists Taking Over London and the World - Prestige Magazine, Hong Kong
- Stephen Short
- Sep 15
- 7 min read
By Stephen Short
Published: JUL 25, 2025 07:56 PM HKT
A powerful new chapter in contemporary Chinese art’s relationship with London – and the globe – is at hand.
While art-market sentiment suggests this year’s Art Basel lacks panache and the global market is suffering fatigue (vis. Sotheby’s inability to sell – or even register interest with – a US$70 million Alberto Giacometti, along with some Warhols and Kadinksys), are people simply looking and thinking and acquiring in the wrong places? After all, if new-found artistic energy, dynamism and boldness are the go-to criteria for the contemporary art world collector or aesthetic admirer, then witness the wave of London-based “emerging” Chinese artists fuelling a movement in the capital and beyond.
The likes of Li Hei Di showing with Pace Gallery in Hong Kong, or Rong Bao through Carl Kostyal in Hong Kong, are apex examples of this thrilling new evolution. “We’re seeing more collectors actively seeking out early-career Chinese artists, drawn to their technical fluency, confidence, and cross-cultural perspectives,” says Joséphine May Bailey, curator, writer and director of sales at London’s Gallery Rosenfeld. “In terms of age and demand, the scene is indeed skewing younger. It feels like we’re witnessing the emergence of a powerful new chapter in contemporary Chinese art’s relationship with London,” she explains.
Which has happened in the blink of an eye in a post-Brexit moment, whereby there’s been a shift in the student demographic applying to UK art schools. And with fewer EU applicants has come more international students, notably from China. “The Royal College of Art has seen a visible increase in Chinese students,” explains Bailey, “and many have commented on the strength and diversity of their practices.”
That notion is reinforced by James Hu, director of Lychee One gallery in Hackney, which opened more than a decade ago and features work predominantly by Chinese artists. “Over the past year, we’ve made a deliberate effort to feature younger Chinese artists in our exhibitions, such as Qian Qian, Dong Xiaochi, Zhang Haoyan, Huang Long and Yi Liu,” Hu says, before dropping an even bigger reveal. “From what I’ve observed, overseas Chinese artists are now receiving far more attention from galleries, collectors and art researchers back in China too. Compared to 2014, this shift is quite remarkable.”
Hu notes the excitement this new Sinophile vibe has brought to the ecosystem at large. “I remember a decade ago, only a handful of distinctive Chinese galleries could bring established artists to top-tier art fairs. Now, a new wave of galleries is actively promoting Chinese artists globally. This momentum has given young Chinese artists a lot to look forward to. Li Hei Di’s success is just the beginning – we’ll surely see more rising stars like her.”
And then some. Right now, it’s no exaggeration to say that London is vibing like a mini-but-infinite-galaxy of rising Chinese art stars all in tantalising stages of development. And all with prodigious skill, technique, profoundest mindsets and nuances of aesthetic prowess.
Chinese art schools have long been known for their scrupulous and highly rigorous training. “Institutions such as the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) and China Academy of Art (CAA) demand exceptional technical discipline from students, which provides a strong foundation for later experimentation,” says Bailey. “This level of preparation results in artists with a deep fluency in both traditional and contemporary visual languages.”
Bailey highlights a recent wave of interest in Chinese abstraction, particularly work that draws from calligraphic structures, vibrant colour, and gestural language. “One particularly exciting artist is Shuang Jiang, whose work I’ve had the pleasure of working with on several occasions. Most recently, we exhibited her paintings at ARCO Lisbon, where all four works sold. Her practice is a striking combination of formal sensitivity and expressive energy, and it’s resonating strongly with collectors.”
And gallery owners, such as Hong Kong’s Queenie Rosita Law, who visited Jiang in February at her London studio, and is showing her this month in a group show at Double Q gallery in Hong Kong. Law typically shows Eastern European artists in her gallery, but appears to have made an exception for Jiang, whom she visited during the artist’s showing with Rosenfeld.
Dalian-born Jiang, whose practice spans painting, printmaking, installation and video, explores themes of fragility, resilience and interconnections between the individual and nature, and her pieces often feature figures derived from prints made on sheepskin, exploring her psychological states and the human condition.
“To me, life never truly vanishes, it simply shifts, continuing its existence in other forms throughout the universe. Animals and plants, human beings and artificial objects – everything is interconnected in this cosmos. Their images are woven together; nothing is born in isolation.”
“When I open my mind, I feel everything flowing within me. Traces of lives converge like rivers as I become one with nature and all other beings. In turn, they quietly embrace me.” Goshest and wowserina. When was the last time an artist told you that?
Or how about Xu Yang. I first came across her intensely feminine work in 2020, at Islington’s No 20 Art gallery, where she was parading and Roccoco-ing the joint in a pink wig. She explained how she appropriated Diego Velazquez’s 1647 masterpiece The Rokeby Venus for her own work, Snake for the Lover 25012020, and I was struck by how effortlessly she combined history with her own experience, making it all feel like some glorious parlour game in paint.
Yang is currently showing in Forget Me Not with von Goetz at Château de Lantheuil in Normandy, where she spoofs on Marie Antoinette’s extravagant poufs – towering hairdos that became as much political tools as personal statements. And when that’s powdered, done and dusted, Xu’s work features this month at the National Portrait Gallery’s Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2025, which celebrates the best work in the genre.
One artist we can’t get enough of is Slade graduate Xinyu Han. She treats individuals living in cities and their physical and emotional alienation; and the relationship between the rules and order of the social environment and the need for emotional release. In depicting motion and stillness, she explores the balance between “chaos” and “order” and manages to “extend” the sense of time on the canvas.
Artist Lavinia Harrington, a friend of Han’s, assesses her work thus. “I admire the way Xinyu renders and communicates emotion. There’s a tension in her work that keeps drawing me in – I have such strong reactions to her paintings, their poignancy and softness and yet the feeling, while palpably vivid, is hard to hold on to.”
Han is currently showing at Soul Art Center Beijing, in the group exhibition Z Generation of Third Culture: Intercultural Child, a presentation of “cross cultural characteristics in current youth paintings”. And one of her paintings is currently under consideration for the John Moores Painting Prize 2025, former winners of which have included Peter Doig, Rose Wylie and David Hockney.
Royal College of Art (RCA) graduate Yi Liu, who has shown at Lychee One, Guts Gallery and Cob, explores the intricate dynamics between primal desire, freedom and control. She draws inspiration from traditional Northern Dynasty hunting murals and erotic art made in Spring Palace paintings.
Her visual sources, often private and intimate, reveal human relationships through metaphors of power and submission. In her ethereal creations, Liu incorporates nomadic horseback intimacy and entangled bodies, expressing the tension between untamed wilderness and societal structures.
“I think Chinese artists in London paint incredibly well and with such strong personal attitude. I find that kind of conviction and clarity in one’s work really inspiring,” she says. “As artists, we’re constantly inspiring and influencing each other in ways we may not even realise.”
Effie Wanyi Li, a graduate of Central Saint Martins and RCA, investigates the internal mechanisms of the body, both physical and psychological, in her work, which resonates with the principles of traditional Chinese acupuncture, and its respective trigger points. Indeed, each brushstroke in Li’s paintings whispers the story of a soul in transformation. This year alone she’s showed with Galerie Perrotin in Shanghai, VinVin in Vienna, Foundry Seoul and through William Hine gallery in London.
“Being a Chinese artist living and working in London, I often feel a kind of in-between state, both emotionally and culturally,” she says, “but I do think things are slowly opening up. People are starting to pay more attention to what the work is actually saying.”
Wenhui Hao is currently showing with New York’s Half Gallery until July 9, and then in The Torrent & The Fold, a group exhibition she also co-curated at LBF Contemporary in London until July 24. Her works have been snapped up by the JPMorganChase Art Collection last year, and also by FAMM Museum in Mougins, France. She’s a good friend of Shuang Jiang.
And then there’s Yijia Wu. A Central Saint Martins graduate and MA graduate from Royal College of Art in Contemporary Art Practice, she’s currently in residence at London’s Sarabande Foundation, set up by Alexander Lee McQueen. I first fell in love with her work during her graduate show in 2023. A multidisciplinary artist who explores everydayness, the fluid notion of home, and both collective and individual experiences of migration, she utilises mundane, often domestic materials to create paradoxical situations for everyday life through performance, sculpture and installation. She recently showed with Apsara Studio in Battersea and is showing works at TANK Shanghai through October.
“As a Chinese artist living in London post-Covid, I often think about what remains after the end of something, and where the boundary lies between every change. The pandemic blurred the line between distance and closeness, and for me it magnified a sense of in-betweenness – geographically, emotionally and culturally. In my practice, I’ve shifted the focus to materiality, using both fragile, ephemeral materials like soap and more enduring ones like stone to hold space for these quiet transitions. I want my works to speak for shifting situations rather than fixed states, to reflect the impermanence of memory and home, while tracing where I’ve come from and where I’ve been.”
Jiangsu-born Mengmeng Zhang has been making waves in London at Fitzrovia Gallery, The Bomb Factory and Mandy Zhang gallery among others. She’s currently part of a four-person group show at Arts & Collections in Shanghai, and in August will show in A Single Piece Gallery in Sydney, though the gallery is run by a Korean team that’s promoting Asian artists abroad. Just days before we went to print, she won the Almacantar Studio Award for her degree show at Slade.
Her works explore the displacement between memory and the present, inner emotion and outer environments. Through intuitive colour choices and expressive mark-making, Zhang incorporates stylised characters to embody moods, actions and experiences inspired by personal reflections on everyday moments.
And a final but oh-so recent discovery, made at the Camberwell graduate show only days ago, Ngai Ning Yu. Yu has a remarkable backstory. Aged 17 when she left Hong Kong, she won first prize in the Asia Society’s Sincerely Me – Inspired by Pan Yu Lin competition (2019), as well as being shortlisted for the UOB Art in Ink Awards the same year. In 2020, she was a finalist for the Sovereign Art Students Prize and was awarded a Visual Arts Scholarship by Discovery College.
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