5 Artists on Our Radar in June 2022

“Artists on Our Radar” is a monthly series produced by the Artsy team. Utilizing our art expertise and access to Artsy data, we highlight five artists who have our attention. To make our selections, we’ve determined which artists made an impact this past month through new gallery representation, exhibitions, auctions, art fairs, or fresh works on Artsy.

John Yuyi

B. 1991, Taipei. Lives and works in New York.

With a background in fashion as well as visual art, Taiwanese artist John Yuyi began making and selling temporary tattoos in order to fund her visa after interning at Jason Wu in New York. Punchy tattoos are now an integral part of Yuyi’s photography practice, her sitters—sometimes a model, other times, herself—are covered in them to comment on consumer culture and the effects of social media.

In Wear NIKE 7 (2018), on view in Yuyi’s eponymous solo exhibition opening on June 10th at Christophe Guye Galerie in Zurich, a figure has the iconic “Just Do It” slogan emblazoned across her bare chest. The Nike logo also appears on her face and neck alongside computer icons and pop-up browsers from the 2000s, illustrating the ways we construct our identities in the post-internet age via brand affinity.

Meanwhile, in Tinder Match 2 (2016), a young woman with “It’s a Match!” printed on her cheek and “NOPE” on her forehead poses for the camera. The work demonstrates how social media validation has become a potential source of identity-building and measure of self-worth.

Yuyi’s photographs both participate in and are critical of the ways internet culture has shaped our perceptions of ourselves and each other. She has exhibited in group shows in New York, Paris, Taipei, and elsewhere, and is a 2021–22 artist-in-residence at Silver Art Project in New York.

—Isabelle Sakelaris

Yasuhisa Kohyama

B. 1936, Shigaraki, Japan. Lives and works in Shigaraki, Japan.

The work of ceramic artist Yasuhisa Kohyama is deeply rooted in the history of the craft and its legacy in his native Japan. His sometimes organic, sometimes geometric forms were the subject of a solo exhibition at Officine Saffi in Milan earlier this year, and are currently on view in a group show at browngrotta arts in Wilton, Connecticut.

Focused on the ancient practices of handbuilding and wood-firing and deeply influenced by Jomon, Shigaraki, and Yayoi pottery, Kohyama keeps the past alive by creating stoneware pieces that are simultaneously rough and elegant, undeniably of the earth yet almost extraterrestrial. While he never uses glazes in his work, his vessels take on a variety of hues when fired in the anagamakiln he built—the first of its kind constructed in the area since the Middle Ages.

Kohyama studied as an apprentice with ceramic designer Sakuzo Hineno and has taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art; School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Office for the Arts at Harvard; among other schools. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and many other institutions.

—Brian P. Kelly

Carlos Jaramillo

B. 1988, McAllen, TX. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Carlos Jaramillo’s photographs document the physical, daily labor involved in Latin American culture and life. In his 2018 solo exhibition “Beyond Bars” at the Gallery at W83 in New York, Jaramillo flipped the script on the common tourist images of Peru to tenderly chronicle, via portraits, life inside and just beyond ​​Lurigancho, a prison in Lima.

For his current solo exhibition “Tierra del Sol,” or Land of the Sun, Jaramillo transformed New York’s Selenas Mountain into a rodeo. On the gallery walls are Jaramillo’s images of the annual charrería “El Clásico de las Américas” in Pico Rivera, California. A charrería is a Mexican rodeo tradition that displays the equestrianism, performance, costume, and athleticism of early activities of corralling livestock in the haciendas of old Mexico. In these photographs, Jaramillo humanizes the labor that is often overlooked for the spectacle of the sport through intense and fragmented close-ups of the performers’ bodies.

Jaramillo received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and has had his photographs widely featured across popular magazines and publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, LA Times, and Musée Magazine. He was the 2022 recipient of the Forest Lawn Museum Arts Fellowship.

—Ayanna Dozier

Zhanna Kadyrova

B. 1984, Brovary, Ukraine. Lives and works in Kyiv.

Zhanna Kadyrova has become well-known for her practice of transforming familiar building materials, like industrial tiles, glass, and stone, into impressive conceptual sculptures that take aim at the Soviet history of her homeland, Ukraine. In new work that responds to the February 24th invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces, Kadyrova is focused on the Ukrainian people at this moment.

Following the invasion, Kadyrova left her home in Kyiv and headed west, settling in a village by the Hungarian border, where she set up a studio and gallery. There, a number of large, smooth stones in a river caught Kadyrova’s eye. They resembled the simple round wheat loaves of bread found across Ukraine and sparked an idea for a new body of work—“Palyanitsia,” the Ukrainian word for bread.

Palyanitsia became a sort of shibboleth. The difficult-to-pronounce word is being used by Ukrainians to distinguish Russian enemies from Ukrainian comrades. Inspired by the symbolism, Kadyrova gathered the stones and cut them into hunks and slices, while leaving some whole. The resulting sculptures are on view in Venice through June 30th in a special show sharing the series’ name, presented by Galleria Continua in time with the Biennale; and were previously on view in Berlin at König Galerie. Kadyrova is donating 100% of the proceeds to volunteer organizations and her peers who stayed in Kyiv to join the defensive forces. So simple, yet so effective, the works are austere reminders of the devastating loss of life, displacement, and destruction.

A graduate of Kyiv’s Taras Shevchenko State Art School, Kadyrova has been awarded multiple international accolades for her work, including the Main PinchukArtCentre Prize in 2013. She has been featured at the 55th, 56th, and 58th editions of the Venice Biennale, including the 2019 international exhibition “May You Live in Interesting Times.” Her work has been exhibited at major institutions and galleries, including Galleria Continua, Baró Galeria, the Shanghai International Sculpture Project JISP, Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, and Pinchuk Art Centre, where, prior to the current conflict, she was due to stage her first career retrospective in 2023.

—Casey Lesser

Emily Weiner

B. 1981, Brooklyn. Lives and works in Nashville.

Emily Weiner’s paintings, often held in custom-made frames, are rich in symbolism and historical allusions. As Weiner described in her artist statement, “my works configure icons, geometries, and material motifs which have been revived, reshaped, and recoded over time.” Repurposing the past while creating a contemporary lexicon all her own, Weiner eagerly explores a wide array of aesthetic avenues.

In Cassandra (2022), a terracotta frame borders a painting of an ancient Greek, red-figure krater, while in Mundus Inversus (2022), a maple frame outlines a shimmering moon peeking through a pair of blood-red curtains. These works evoke artists from across art history—from Euphronios, to Georgia O’Keefe, to Jonas Wood—while refusing to be pinned down by any one epoch.