Art Basel Miami Beach 2023: Booth A15

Didier William lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. Within his practice, William has developed a distinct and ever-morphing visual language through bold pattern making and use of vivid color. William’s recent work largely draws on his memories of growing up in Miami after immigrating from Port-au-Prince, Haiti as a young boy. Pulling from Haitian history, language, mythology, and his personal experiences, he explores the legacies of colonialism, resistance, and then struggle for agency and identity. His work examines the relationship between formalism – his compositions combine both painting and printmaking techniques and push the limits of figuration and abstraction – and the narrative capacities of painting.

Zheng Chongbin lives and works in San Francisco. One of the most influential experimental ink painters of the 1980s, Zheng is widely recognized for his work exploring and deconstructing the conventions and constituents of classical Chinese ink tradition and Western pictorial abstraction. Finding inspiration in the natural light and landscape of Northern California where he has lived since the early 1990s Zheng draws influence from his formal training at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou alongside more contemporary references to the Light and Space movement in his intricate works on paper and large-scale installations. The notion of the world as always in flux, consisting of flows of matter and energy that repeatedly cohere and dissipate, is central to his work. Inherent in pre-modern Chinese and especially Daoist thought, this worldview enables contemporary inquiries into complex systems like climate and social behavior, artificial intelligence, and quantum physics. Through the interactions of ink, acrylic, water, and paper, Zheng’s paintings generate and record the processes that underlie the emergence of order and its inevitable dissipation.

Troy Lamarr Chew II lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. The artist’s rich visual language draws heavy inspiration from hip hop culture. His work looks methodically at systems of coded communication and how this is translated and mistranslated within the African diaspora and throughout the mainstream. A highly skilled realist inspired by European painting techniques, Chew utilizes these art historical traditions to underscore their exclusion of Blackness.

Hiba Kalache lives and works between San Francisco, CA and Beirut, Lebanon. Within her multidisciplinary practice encompassing drawing, painting and sculptural installation, Kalache addresses the geopolitics of the middle east from the perspective of a female body. On four separate occasions throughout the course of her life, Kalache has left her family home in Beirut behind. Uprooted from her heritage, the abstract idea of translation has been a literal fact of her daily existence and a recurring theme in her work. Her canvases, layered with soft washes of acrylic ink and passionate, intuitive bursts of color, are rooted in a sense of landscape, but the artist’s fragmented and instinctive gestures recall the splintering of memories over the passage of time, leaving traces of emotion untethered to concrete imagery or place. The resulting works, surreal and imagined, exist outside of time and place, referencing the abjectness of the physical body and its experiences.