In a career spanning over three decades, artist Nari Ward (b. 1963, St. Andrew, Jamaica; lives and works in New York, NY) has gained recognition for an interdisciplinary and multimedia practice that engages historical and contemporary discourse around race, migration, democracy, identity, and community. Ward is best known for his wall and installation-based sculptural works created primarily from materials found and collected throughout Harlem, his longtime neighborhood in New York. These objects imbue his work with a sense of intimacy, reflecting the shared experience of community. Combining materials to re-contextualize their original meanings, Ward’s assemblages probe a range of spiritual and conceptual issues through literal and metaphorical juxtaposition.

Materially specific but conceptually ambiguous, Ward’s multimedia and performance works unfold into many possible interpretations—as materials and movements accumulate, so too do signifiers. Each found object—including baseball bats, strollers, shoelaces, cash registers, bottles, and shopping carts—contains a multiplicity of meanings and histories that speak to both collective experience and individual memory. The intentional synthesis of such objects, combined with the more traditional disciplines of painting, sculpture, and performance, allows for varied interpretations, inviting viewers to project their own associations and transcend the specific context of any given work. At the same time, Ward’s art reflects on the complexities of contemporary society, transforming overlooked material through artmaking to foreground forgotten histories or marginalized communities.

Liu Wei (b. 1972, Beijing, China; lives and works in Beijing, China) explores 21st-century socio-political concepts such as the contradictions of contemporary society and the transformation of developing cities and the urban landscape. In many of his sculptural and installation works, he uses found materials that are re-contextualized to draw new meanings out of the materials from which they are made. Liu Wei frequently uses geometric and architectural forms in his work as a reference to his urban surroundings.

Liu Wei graduated from the China Academy of Art in 1996. Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized at Long Museum, Shanghai, China (2020); Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH (2019); PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea (2016); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), Beijing, China (2015); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2014); and Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2011).