Red Inc.

Red Inc. is a collective of eight East-Asian Australian artists – Casey Chen, Chris Chew, Rosemary Lee, Tya Tey, Yu Xin Jia, Morus Quin, Alicia Zhao, and Richard Chaohsi Wu – whose practices imagine what emerges from diversely hybridised cultural experiences.

Ceramic artist Casey Chen's practice references historical illustrations from an eclectic mix of folklore, mythology and pop culture. 

Blending childhood nostalgia with long-standing East-Asian ceramic traditions, Chen applies his imagery to hand-thrown plates and vases, which are then fused with geometric patterns from traditional sources. The result is a cultural pastiche, and a dynamic conversation between traditional craft and contemporary perspective.

Casey’s recent work draws upon imagery and motifs from the archetypal tales of the four great classic novels of Chinese literature: Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber. His resulting works are both a self-exploration and an homage to the rich and enduring history of Chinese porcelain craft and Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

In 2020, Chen graduated from the National Art School with a Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in ceramics, and was the recipient of the annual Harvey Galleries National Art School Exhibition award.

Chris Chew combines the discordant modes of hard edge abstraction with the surreal. Using fields of flat colour mimicking the nostalgic and obsolete world, Chew creates a dreamlike, ethereal space both recognisable yet other – reminiscing what never really existed. Organic figures and animals occupy these impossible spaces, obscuring the line between second and third dimensions.

His experiences of being raised under Taoism and learning Chinese calligraphy finds its way into his compositions and methodologies, visually represented by oppositionary and discordant ideas (yin-yang), and Chinese text. His imaginings produce an unusual friction between enduring archaic symbolism and the fleeting ephemera of the digital and contemporary world.

Rosemary Lee is a Sydney-based artist, with a Bachelor of Fine Art from the National Art School. Lee is a painter, draughtsman and printmaker, predominantly working in coloured pencil. She uses her keen interest in observation to draw on everyday scenes. Her attention to detail highlights the intricacies of our surroundings.

Morus Quin is a Sydney-based artist working across, performance, printmaking, painting and jewellery. Quin’s work maps out culturally modified perspectives of the body, inhabiting both feminist and medical perspectives. She unravels the impacts of trauma on the body, seeking to understand the body’s processes of activity and decay in response to trauma.

Through her Chinese and American background and her studies in Traditional Chinese Medicine, Quin works to expand our cultural narratives of both the body and identity and bring this expanse into a colliding, clashing and harmonsing unity.

Alicia Zhao is a Sydney-based artist living and working on Gadigal land. Working primarily in sculpture, she explores the transformation of materials such as wood and steel into lyrical and rhythmic compositions that move through space. This sense of motion is reflected in Alicia’s painting practice. With the use of watercolours, she creates playful configurations of architectural forms that are caught in the midst of invisible forces.  

Alicia holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from The National Art School and since graduating has exhibited with Sculpture by the Sea and May Space Gallery.

Tya Tey uses drawing and painting as forms of writing, and inversely writing as forms of paint, drawing and markmaking. Her work forms an anthology through a series of multiple mirrors, implying an optical perspective of human cognition and reflecting loss and existence.

Richard Wu is a Sydney-based psychiatrist who practises Chinese ink painting and writes on the psychological elements of Chinese traditional ink art.

Wu uses Chinese inkbrush painting, influenced by the Southern Song dynasty Chan style（禅画）, whose masters developed their unique approach characterised by simplification of form, and brush strokes to capture one’s inner world. The Chan paintings of this era formed the origin of Japanese Zen painting, although they remained relatively unknown in Chinese art history.

Yu Xin Jia's (Peter) artistic background begins in his EzyMart store in Darlinghurst, after running multiple gallery exhibitions under the name 'EzyArt'. These exhibitions came during a lull caused by the pandemic, but allowed Peter to showcase his love for painting through earnest, vibrant and whimsical works. His work is influenced by traditional Chinese art, as well as the Western institutional canon, unexpectedly practicing and exhibiting alongside National Art School students and graduates.

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