Jamies Wang

Jamies Wang, whose real name is Tzu Ting Wang, is a young artist from Taiwan. Her drawings and painting studies capture an ephemeral moment; the passage of time. She doesn't use reference images as a starting point. Rather, she begins with a gesture, a soft mark that slowy becomes heavier as the intention and focus becomes narrower. She attempts to tap into the subconscious to create an intuitive landscape characterized by thought rather than what's physically accurate.

Hatsuki Yamashita: Design Festa Tokyo

Hatsuki Yamashita's mixed media work is haunting. Yamashita's landscapes seem photographic in their detail, but the main character and focus feels empty and sinister. There isn't much information online about the artist (and my Japanese is a little rusty). These pieces were seen at Design Festa Art Fair in Tokyo. Design Festa features the work of about 10,000 artists working in a wide range of media. The two-day show is held biannually and was started in 1994. Next show date: November 10 - 11, 2012.

Matthias Heiderich

Matthias Heiderich captures the brighter side of Berlin with his cheery, minimal photography. Heiderich focuses on things like vintage roller coasters, murals, and playgrounds making Berlin look more like a doppelgänger of Santa Monica. The compositions are flat and pretty barren, and taken together, they evoke a drugged-out listlessness. Heiderich is self-taught and uses a wide range of camera types including a medium format twin lens camera, Polaroids, and Holgas.

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.

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski's solo show, "Timothy Galoty & the Dead Brains" runs through July 30 at Hauser & Wirth in NYC. At 30 years old, the Polish-born painter is one of the most critically admired young artists on the international art scene. The exhibition is named after a fictional rock band that serves as a kind of alter ego in Ziolkowski’s paintings. They portray a world of surreal landscapes and disturbing anthropomorphic imagery that vacillates between the familiar and the hallucinatory, the light and the dark. His work has been profoundly shaped by the folk traditions and lore of Poland, as well as its more recent, turbulent history. (Text taken from Vogue)