Iman Jabrah

International College

I am Iman Jabrah, a multidisciplinary visual artist and curator, currently based in Cincinnati, USA and Hangzhou, China. Since childhood, I have been traveling a lot and spending time being familiar with various countries. I enjoy integrating and balancing experiences with practice through visual art, creative research, workshops, residencies, curatorial passages as well as other forms of documenting creative dialogues.

With a background in new media and fine art, I seek the materials around me. My work is sculpture installation leaning towards textiles. I showcase my surrounding influences by using materials and colors I comprehend. My work plays a lot with the concept of duality and balance in composition and concept, to display a yin-yang practice centered and grounded in earthy tangible materials. Through my work, the audience can easily find my cultural identities: A Palestinian with childhood influences from Saudi Arabia, and later influences from Mid-Western art-practice in the Americas, one who balances them out using Chinese materials such as silk, rice paper and Chinese coins.

As for why I chose to use Chinese materials in my work, after I recognized the use of darkness found in my work to be very heavy to approach as a dialogue, the desire suddenly popped up to allow Chinese materials to play a role in becoming a source of light to balance out the subject matter, whether by printing on silk, such as my artwork titled fleeting moments, using acrylic and oil on canvas to display the dark lines on very light see-through material to suddenly make the heaviness go away when watching the material flow beneath the ceiling. As I was working on the silk piece with coins titled Constellations in dialogue with Gypsy, I embodied the concept of being in solitude in a temple, away from the hustle and bustle of the city. I envision a temple that doesn't really exist to let my audience understand the energy around me.

Huang Lixian

School of Painting

I was born in a small coastal city in China. Since I was a kid, I have always enjoyed painting. In my teens, I studied and settled down in Singapore. Later, I went on to work in interior design. My body protested due to my busy life and work, so I decided to go back to my first passion. I was accepted by the China Academy of Art, and became a graduate student at the School of Painting.

Most of the elements in my work are related to architecture or space. This has to do with the way I've grown attuned to architecture and space while I was working in interior design, as well as my life experiences. I grew up in a coastal city in China. Later, I studied and made my home in Singapore. The living spaces in the two countries are similar yet different. That has often led me to confusion as to space and time and complicated feelings about it too.

Throughout my artistic practice, I have always held a deep love for urban architecture and spaces. To me, a building is not just a cold, lifeless structure, but is instead a physical embodiment of life, memory and history. In my artworks, I seek to deconstruct the notion of time, memory and emotion through the lens of our built environment. Simultaneously, my paintings are also an observation of the harmonious, conflicting andinterdependent relationship between different objects in my physical surroundings, as well as my personal relationship and feelings towards them. In our current pluralistic society, where cultures and traditions are constantly undergoing a state of change, progress and evolution, it has become increasingly difficult for an individual to feel a strong sense of personal identity and belonging in this world. More than ever, it is important for us to look inwards and to find our sense of self amidst all of the chaos. By pushing me to consistently engage in a process of self-dialogue and reconciliation, art has allowed me to better understand myself and my relationship with the world. In the same vein, I hope that my artworks will inspire viewers to look both outwards at their surroundings and inwards atthemselves.

Alan Skalaski

International College

My name is Alan Skalaski and I am an American artist from New Jersey. I graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016, and studied as a visiting scholar at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. I am a graduate from the China Academy of Art with a Master’s Degree from the IMFA program.

My graduation works are contemplations of my own personal history and the space which foreigners find themselves occupying in China. I wrote my thesis about the history of the foreign community in Beijing, and both of my paintings, represent those themes with large crowds and landmarks from my time in China. Surprisingly my three water bottle sculptures have been really popular and have sparked some debate on RED, which is a popular social media platform in China. This artwork is made of a common household object that people interact with every day, and the creation of it is very simple, but it has generated much discussion and for that I am thankful.

Although a majority of my time at the China Academy of Art has been spent in online classes, I do really appreciate the student community, as well as the teachers and other faculty. This sense of community is maybe more important than classes themselves, because a student’s peers will later become their contacts and network within the art and design industry.