Contemporary Artists

Curators text for this room coming soon…….

  • 敖乾枥 Chando Ao was born in 1990, and now lives and works in New York. He graduated from Tufts University + School of Museum of Fine Arts in 2016 and received Cornell Tech\ART award in 2024 and The Chan Sculpture Award in 2015. Chando Ao's practice navigates between two extremes: on the one hand, his solo endeavors in paintings and drawings; on the other hand, he builds a complex and open system, which needs to be accomplished in conjunction with the external world, which includes robots, flora and fauna, software, food, machinery, exceptionally unique materials, and everyday consumer goods. This system is designed to engage the viewer, inviting them to touch, embrace, climb, and even juggle with the work. These two modes of creation mirror his dual states as an individual—introspectively sensing himself on one hand, and outwardly conveying a concise and fundamental sensory experience on the other.

  • 刘佳玉 Liu Jiayu, born in 1990 and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2014, is a media artist based in Beijing and London who dedicates herself to the creative practice and research of new media art.

    Reflections in nature inspire her creation and exploration of the multiple relationships between humans and the natural world. Through mutual translation of natural languages, she uses installations as a port of transmission and feedback to explore the virtual spaces and the real world. Her works are deeply rooted in Eastern poetics and philosophy. In recent years, Liu has integrated AI as a sensitive creative tool to explore the interplay between humans, computer vision, and nature. Her artworks have been exhibited many times at multiple renowned galleries at home and abroad. She also participated in the 59th Venice Biennale.

  • Memo Akten is a multi-disciplinary artist, musician, and researcher creating Speculative Simulations and Data Dramatizations investigating the intricacies of human-machine entanglements. His work explores perception and states of consciousness; the tensions between ecology, technology, science and spirituality; and for more than a decade he’s been working with Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and our Collective Consciousness as scraped by the Internet, to reflect on the human condition. He writes code and uses algorithmic / data-driven design and aesthetics to create moving images, sounds, large-scale responsive installations and performances. He holds a PhD from Goldsmiths University of London, specializing in artistic and creative applications of Artificial Intelligence, and he is currently Assistant Professor of Computational Art at University of California San Diego (UCSD).

    Akten has received numerous awards including the prestigous Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica. His work has been widely exhibited and performed internationally at venues such as The Grand Palais, The Barbican, The Royal Opera House, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Sonar Festival, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai Ming Contemporary Art Museum and many others. He has been featured in major publications such as Wired, The Guardian, Dazed, Nowness, The Financial Times, and he has collaborated with celebrities such as Lenny Kravitz, U2, Depeche Mode and Professor Richard Dawkins. He has served as mentor and jury on numerous international awards, residencies and conferences such as SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, and Google Arts and Culture.

  • Felix Luque Sanche’s installations are configured as autonomous and uncontrollable systems in which each element plays a role in both their functional and visual design. The machines are thus conceived not only in terms of the processes they carry out, but also as objects of aesthetic contemplation. Each artwork is divided into different parts or sections, that can be read as chapters of the same narrative, constitutive elements of a system, or attempts at exploring a single subject. This fragmentation counters the apparent oneness of the piece and the seemingly perfect operation of the machine. Failure and vulnerability are present in the way that these devices are forced to maintain delicate balances, pursue nonsensical dialogues, generate incomplete renderings of reality, and finally express themselves by means of a sound score that results from their own activity and the physical processes involved in it. The artist consciously plays with the contradictory perception of technology as purely functional while at the same time imbued with a mysterious purpose, and the fear that machines may replace humans. Inspired by science fiction, he draws from its aesthetic and conceptual foundations the tools to elaborate speculative narrations and address the spectator using preconceptions about technology in popular culture. The outcome is a series of artworks that fascinate by their technical elegance and intriguing opacity, at the same time attracting and distancing themselves from the viewer".

  • William Latham is well known for his pioneering Organic Art created in the late eighties and early nineties whilst a Research Fellow at IBM in Winchester, UK. His artificial life and AI art is currently undergoing a significant re-evaluation in the context of the current Generative AI Art boom, with many shows and exhibitions of his work around the globe.

    From 1993 for thirteen years, initially he worked in Rave Music video production, album cover design and visual stage design and then moved into computer games development leading two development studios games published by Universal Studios, Virgin Interactive and Konami.

    In 2007 he became a Professor in Computing at Goldsmiths University of London. From 2016 his Mutator VR Art Experience developed with long term collaborator Stephen Todd, with Lance Putnam and Peter Todd has been exhibited at museums and galleries in Linz, Shanghai, Brussels, Kyoto, Venice, Dusseldorf, London and in St. Petersburg (The Hermitage Museum) and  the Centre Georges Pompidou. His new work ties together artificial life, physics, interactive hardware and AI.

    William is an Honorary Research Fellow at The Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL and is a Visiting Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture. William trained as an artist at Oxford University and was a Henry Moore Scholar at The Royal College of Art.

  • Prof Parashkev Nachev leads the High-Dimensional Neurology Group at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology in London, and is an Honorary Consultant Neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. His research is focused on the use of highly expressive computational models to characterise the brain, especially deep generative models of neuroimaging, cognitive and behavioural data. He has also innovated in the realm of generative art, with amongst the first applications of deep generative methods to portraiture.

  • Patrick Tresset is a contemporary French artist based in Brussels.  Best known for his performative installations, he explores the representation of human presence and experience using computational systems, AI, robotics, and traditional media.

    Tresset studied at Goldsmiths College in London from 2004 with Prof Frederic Fol Leymerie, where he earned a master’s and an MPhil in Arts and Technology.  Following this, he was a senior research fellow, artist in residence with professor Oliver Deussen at the University of Konstanz and later a visiting adjunct professor at the University of Canberra.  Although he has focused exclusively on his artistic practice for the past decade, his research into computational creativity and graphics is referenced in over 300 academic publications, including drawing, psychology, AI, robotics and computational graphics.

    Since 2011 he had sixteen solo shows and his work has been exhibited in group exhibitions in major museums worldwide, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Prada Foundation in Milan, the V&A in London, the MMCA in Seoul, the Grand Palais in Paris, BOZAR in Brussels, TAM in Beijing, Mcam in Shanghai, and the Mori Museum in Tokyo.

    His installations, paintings, drawings, and digital works are included in public and private collections and have received prizes and distinctions, including from Lumen, Ars Electronica, NTAA-Liedst Foundation and the Japan Media Festival.  He was also nominated a 2017 WEF cultural leader.

    His installations have been featured in various media outlets, such as Art Press, Art Review, Beaux Arts, Frieze, Arte, Form, Wired, Vice, BBC, DeWelle, Le Monde, The New York Times and Neural.

    A monograph, “Human Traits and the Art of Creative Machines” edited by Ryszard W. Kluszczyński was published in 2016.

  • Han Yajuan: holds a bachelor's and master's degree in oil painting from the China Academy of Art and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, respectively. She earned her PhD in Art and Computational Technology from Goldsmiths, University of London.

  • Katie Peyton Hofstadter is a Los Angeles-based writer, artist and curator. She has co-founded several international art campaigns, including ARORA, a network of over 70 artists creating new AR monuments to diverse female and gender-expansive voices in public spaces; the Climate Clock monument NYC, a global call to #actintime on the climate crisis; and Future Art Models, an experiment in prefigurative imagination commissioned by apexart, guiding young creatives to design alternative professional models in the arts. As a writer, she is a contributor to Flash Art, The Believer, BOMB, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and Right Click Save. Her work has been featured in publications including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, Hyperallergic and ArtFCity. Her writing has been curated into exhibitions at EPOCH.GALLERY, Vellum/LA and Cal Poly + The Center for Expressive Technologies. She has taught at Parsons, The New School, and F.I.T.

  • Maxim Zhestkov is an artist who examines the connections of physical and digital realities. Divided by a permeable membrane, these two worlds exist in a constant exchange and redefine one another. Zhestkov acts on their intersection: manifesting the continuity of exploration, he imagines new worlds and expands the understanding of the phenomena present in our universe.


    Merging architecture, sculpture, color, movement, and sound, the artist combines various channels of perception to develop a distinct universal language to depict complicated concepts and ideas in a succinct yet not scaled down manner. Experience and observation as well as a diverse and digitally sophisticated toolkit give an endless supply to this artistic research. Combining basic geometrical shapes — dots, spheres, and planes — Zhestkov creates intricate and hypnotic visual stories centralized on objects in their volume, detail, and beauty of movement.


    The message of his art exploration is to find ways out of implicit limits of comprehension: capturing the unexpected, Maxim aspires to open doors to the unknown and spotlight the unseen.