Zinan: Shanghai based street artist

Zinan is a young and polyhedric contemporary Chinese artist who finds his routes and his inspirations in many forms of arts.
He studied Fashion Design in the University of Shenzhen, graduated in 2007, but already in 2003 he started working on his first graffiti, first composed of letters and then, from 2005, focusing more on landscapes, that he found much more involving.

He feels a particular attraction for the spontaneity of nature that clearly shows a freshness that, according to Zinan, the urban context has lost because of its huge number of people and because of a certain kind of frenzy that characterizes it.

In 2012 he moved to Shanghai which he thinks is the most stimulating city in China for a young contemporary artist, thanks to the artistic ferment present on the metropolis. On the contrary, he was finding Shenzhen a bit limited in terms of culture and sources of inspiration.

Because of his need to explore the world, he engaged himself in many travels in China and abroad. He loved the landscapes of Yunnan province, Tibet, Thailand and the Cambodian jungle that gave him a strong energy, essential for his artistic creations.

He had the chance to explore the American street art, during his stay in Los Angeles and Hawaii, and to deeply analyse Italian Renaissance art during his stay in Florence, where he was particularly fascinated by the sculptures.

All these elements had a strong impact on him and gave him the possibility to closely face western symbols, who became an important source of inspiration for him. This hunger of achieving new skills and getting to know new realities, shapes this artist.

He attended festivals in New York, Hong Kong (HKWalls) and Japan where he exhibited his essential and clear painting style, characterised by the use of geometrical shapes and simple colours, representing, most of all, natural subjects. He recently did a collaboration with Nike Campus in Shanghai and also worked with Louis Vuitton (design of a foulard).

He has always experimented many kinds of supports such as wood, acrylic, LED and canvas.

Zinan and his collaborator Didi are the founders of OOP SUPPLY, a brand whose products are street wear clothes, everyday goods and prints portrayed in a series of T-shirt, discovering the close relationship between fashion and visual arts.

They will challenge themselves in a new project starting from October 2017, consisting of a documentary of a “one month trip” throughout the marvellous sceneries of Vietnam and Laos where they will explore the natural and urban settings of this places, while making murals and installations using local materials, recreating and reinterpreting them into something new.

Every artwork, once finished, will be left to local people...