One of the last exhibitions I saw in Beijing before I returned to the States from living there was a solo show by Lin Tianmiao. I wished I had seen more of her work earlier in my time living in China, as it would have helped me stay positive about the mostly shallow and confused art scene there that was at the time propped up by sleazy, orientalist gallerists from Europe. I’m sure things have changed a lot since I left, but Lin’s sculptures and installations made an impression on me with their evocative usage of gendered and delicate materials in bold, large-scale, and tactile ways. Lin’s work had a fully-rendered clarity about them that I found lacking in other contemporary Chinese art, which I mostly found derivative and one-dimensional.

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The work of Chinese comic artist Benjamin — nee Bin Zhang — is full of energy, and bright but contracted colours. He has published his comic book in seven European countries, and his book, Orange, was a big hit in the French market. After impressing fans with his fast and dynamic drawing skills at the Comic Convention in New York, the editors at Marvel Comics started to take notice of this young digital artist.

Chinese artist Yan Wei, aka Kokomoo, creeps me out. Her linear, black and white drawings of cute little girls with maniacal grins and soulless eyes look deep into my psyche with a hunger for destruction and pain. Luckily, in their two dimensional forms, they are unable to leap off the page and sink their sharp little teeth into my soft flesh. Instead, I can enjoy their evil cuteness from a safe distance, while pondering the reasons why Kokomoo’s style gets darker and darker as the years go on.

At some point her illustrations changed from angelic to demonic, and while I don’t want to meet any of these frightening little girls in a dark alleyway, I think that Kokomoo’s descent into darkness has made her a better artist. I wish I could read her blog to find out the inspiration behind her latest works, but unfortunately I don’t understand Mandarin.

Chinese artist Liu Jianhua has built a model of the Shanghai skyline using just poker chips and dice. Widely known for his quirky ceramic sculptures, his exhibition Dream in Conflict has just been opened at the Galleria Continua in Italy and features Unreal Scene amongst other works bordering on the surreal.

Xinjian Lu is a Professor of Visual Communication at South Korea’s Yeungnam University. But he is also a gifted artist in his own right, as evidenced by these elaborately shaped and vibrantly coloured works from his Love series.

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Eli Klein Fine Art Gallery in Soho is exhibiting Zhang Hui’s first showing in New York. The Beijing painter, Zhang Hui, is known for her portraitures of young girls with scars on their faces and guns in their hands. She pairs innocence with violence in a cartoon-esque style, making her work dark and disturbing, yet still capturing the brighter side of the darkness. Hui explains: ‘I live in Beijing. I’m a little kid. I want to become more beautiful and more fashionable. I want to have beautiful dresses. I want to have cotton candy. I want to be happy. Do you want to go back to being a child? My goal is to simply accept anger and sadness, while enjoying the happiness in my life’.

Tim Lee’s illustrations are wonderfully intricate and precise, a tangled world of escapism and realism mixed into one. ‘My work carries a heavy eastern influence. I think this is probably due to my Chinese heritage. Composition, rhythm and balance are the elements that I focus on. I like images that portray a sense of beauty and sadness and that work on a poetic level’.

Taking a cue from Trevor Brown, Mainland Chinese artist Zhang Peng creates highly stylized photographs of women, whom he tweaks, with deft usage of the liquify function in Photoshop, to look like dolls. His paintings also reflect the same whimsical approach to critiquing the dual ideals emerging in China that simultaneously objectify and infantilize women.