10 Must-See Works at Shanghai’s West Bund Art Fair

painted his own face onto the face of his English teacher before filming him teaching a class. The dual faces are disconcerting, like something an Instagram makeup artist would post on Halloween, but the work is also a keen meditation on the way artists and subjects—and teachers and students—inform and assume each other’s ideas and perceptions. The notion that good teachers leave an impression on their students is inverted at the end of the video, when the teacher’s painted face is pressed into paper, leaving an impression of the student. Born in Kanagawa in 1980, Chiba has been collected by museums in Japan, as well as Hong Kong’s M+ Museum. Six of his paintings are showing at the Shanghai Biennale, which opens to the public November 10th.

Beijing-based artist

’s paintings look like something

would make if the world ever ran out of stainless steel. Her lush, hyperreal inflatables have struck a chord in China. Sun only received her post-graduate degree in painting from the Central Academy of Fine Art in 2018, but she already counts Yuz Museum founder Budi Tek among her collectors. Her solo show “A Twinkle” all but sold out when it concluded at BANK in late October.

has been making works from antique pinball games for years. He finds them—and the materials he meticulously installs inside—at flea markets and dumps in Japan, the U.S., and Europe, and increasingly on eBay. Each is its own miniature study of space and science, mysticism and chaos. Contemporary Fine Arts launched a catalogue of Ni’s pinball works series, entitled Relic (2018), at the fair. Of more than 60 pieces he has created, Ni said he has sold more than half. A particular highlight is this football stadium, whose running track serves as an orbit, with a grid that’s meant to be reminiscent, the artist says, of

.

The temporal zoom-out in the title of this work—from the ephemeral moments in a day, smoking a cigarette and scrolling through Instagram, to the sudden passage of millennia—is a worthy effort at confronting our outsized interest in the immediate. The contrast of goopy, collapsed carbon and bright, plasticky-resin is especially cogent in China, the coal and cement heart of the Anthropocene era, where little effort is being made to reduce the production of materials that will long outlast their usefulness. Thai-American artist

was born in 1986, studying at the Rhode Island School of Design before earning his MFA from Columbia; he now lives in New York’s Chinatown, with a studio in Queens. His London gallery, Carlos/Ishikawa, has joined the fair for the first time this year, sharing a booth with Shanghai gallery Antenna Space.

With West Bund feeling more grown-up than ever,

was still able to sneak a whoopee cushion of a work onto the walls. The artist is depicted as a painter’s palette with eyes and nose stuck on, Mr. Potato Head–style. He’s placed on a crucifix that’s flanked on either side by a banana phallus and a buxom, benippled coconut palm. Though he doesn’t sport one himself, the self-portrait has a Groucho Marx moustache, and the rest of the composition makes about as much sense as a statement often credited to Marx: “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” Even the date on the work—the 13th month of 2018—is absurd. It’s all id, a welcome counterpoint to the superego of so many young Chinese artists whose work too quickly goes dry, wry, bloodless, and boring.

Indonesian gallery ROH Projects took the unusual step of borrowing works from collectors to flesh out its solo show of paintings by

. Paintings from the 1990s, including Diet is Completed (1999)—which seesa tough-looking nurse inquire “ganteng…pesan apa?” (“what do you want to eat, handsome?”)—are combined with two new works. One is a triptych of female superheroes, all with nothing but cleaning instruments for weapons, suggesting a tension between pop-cultural messages of female empowerment and persistent prejudices. The other, Dance of Peace, features mythical black-skinned women dancing for the viral, inane, ubiquitous lip-sync app TikTok.

Despite being one of China’s top artists, showing at the 2007 Venice Biennale and taking part in the 2017 Guggenheim exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World,”

hasn’t showed in Shanghai much in recent years. Born in Beijing in 1963, her ceramic works incorporate found fabrics, embedding some of the fraught recent history in a material often more associated with ancient greatness.

Through her photographs,

revisits memories of lost moments, a practice that takes on special significance when you discover that much of her hometown, Wanzhou, was wiped out during the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, submerged by rising reservoir waters. Born in 1975, Chen graduated from the printmaking department of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. Her experience as the sole female in her childhood martial arts class inspired this image of a Chinese student—wearing a typical high-school tracksuit—practicing his forms on a barge.