Victo Ngai

Victo Ngai's cultural background is hard to nail down: she speaks Chinese, English, and Japanese. She attended Christian schools, but is not Christian. She holds a British passport, but is not truly British. She is a Hong Kong citizen but holds no Chinese ID card. Her parents live in Hong Kong; her grandparents are Chinese American on the west coast. She goes to the Rhode Island School of Design.

Victo is an illustrator and finds her identity there. She takes strong influence from Japanese woodblock prints and Asian arts in general. She believes that style is overrated. "Style merely means one's habit of drawing based on one's own experiences. Therefore, everyone has a unique style because everyone has a unique life."

Victo works both traditionally and digitally. The lines are done with nib pens or rapidograph pens. The textures are done on different pieces of paper with various mediums, like graphite, acrylic, and oil pastels. Then everything is digitally composed and colored in Adobe Photoshop.

Charles Clary

Charles Clary layers colored paper to build up variegated textures and sinewy shapes into large scale installations. His constructions appear ever-expanding, overwhelming exhibition spaces like replicating viruses or reverberating sound waves. The pieces may look like they’re highly orchestrated precision-cut sculptures, but Clary favors a more organic creative philosophy: “It’s all intuitive. It’s just one layer playing off another, playing off another,” he says. “But I do try to make the viewer wonder whether they’re handmade or if industrial equipment is used, so I have to be very clean with my cuts.”

Brian Dettmer

Brian Dettmer is a contemporary artist known for his alteration of preexisting media — such as old books, maps, record albums, and cassette tapes — to create new, transformed works of visual fine art. Dettmer was influenced heavily by working in a sign shop where his work transformed to explore the relationship between text, images, language, and codes, including paintings based on braille, Morse Code, and American Sign Language. He began to make work by pasting newspapers and book pages to canvas and tearing off pieces. In 2000, Dettmer started to experiment by gluing and cutting into books. He selectively removes portions to reveal what's inside, though never inserts or moves the contents.