Balloonski
James Jean
Olga Lah
Tom Fruin
WAN-JEN CHEN
Spenser Little
BALLOONSKI
California
Balloon Art has come a long way from the dog and sword. Even though the balloon world is rapidly growing, there is still plenty of room to innovate. The aim of Balloonski is to think outside the box with forward intentions, while riding waves of the latest trends mixed with retro nostalgia. All to create a deep reaction for your enjoyment, or spark a real conversation about the world around you.
Daigo Daikoku
Japan
Daigo Daikoku entered Nippon Design Center after graduating from the Kanazawa College of Art in 2003, and started Daikoku Design Institute in 2011. The Daikoku Design Institute excels at simple, clear, and bold concept ideation and design execution. It focuses on art, lifestyle, and technology and wishes to collaborate with socially conscious people and companies in order to propose and create new value.
Daigo Daikoku moved to Los Angeles in 2018. He has worked with companies, educational organizations, the government, architects, and artists to create projects in various fields. His interests are in art, lifestyle, and technology; and he works closely in the above fields to create new value. He has created design with a holistic approach, having a home ground in graphic design and crossing bounds to work in fields including branding, visual identity, packaging, editorial design, web, motion graphics, typography, product design, and storefront design. His works and concepts value simplicity, clarity, and boldness, aiming to communicate not only information but also emotions and philosophies.
James jean
California
James Jean is a Taiwanese American visual artist, known for both his commercial work and fine art gallery work. He is known in the American comics industry as a cover artist for various books published by DC Comics, as well as for his work for Prada, ESPN, and Atlantic Records. His work, which has been collected in numerous volumes, has been compared by The New York Times to that of Maxfield Parrish.
Jean was born in Taiwan and raised in New Jersey. He was educated at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, from which he graduated in 2001.
In 2001, Jean became a cover artist for DC Comics, garnering seven Eisner awards, three consecutive Harvey awards, two gold medals and a silver from the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles, and a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators of New York. He also worked in advertising, and has contributed to many national and international publications. His clients included Time Magazine, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, ESPN, Atlantic Records, Target, Playboy, Knopf, Prada among others. He illustrated covers for the comic book seriesFables and The Umbrella Academy, for which he has won six Eisner Awards for “Best Cover Artist”. In 2006 he won Best Artist from the World Fantasy Awards.
Olga Lah
California
Olga Lah is a second generation Korean-American, born and raised in Torrance, California. She has resided in Long Beach for the last 13 years. She received a double B.A. in Studio Art and Art History from the University of California at Riverside. And also received an M.A. in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. She creates large-scale, site-specific installations that explore ideas on transcendence and existence. Her work has been exhibited extensively including at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Los Angeles International Airport. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, OC Weekly, KCET Artbound and Los Angeles Magazine.
SPENSER LITTLE
California
Spenser Little is a self-taught artist who has been bending wire for the last 15 years. He likes to make most of his designs out of one continuous wire strand, incorporating abstract and realistic images, kinetic sculpture, and sometimes snippets of text. His work has been shown in fine art galleries, music festivals, such as Kaaboo, Ripley’s Believe or Not, NPR, National Geographic, Vogue Italia, and he is the co-founder of local artist collective, the Cohort collective. He has lived In Oakland, San Francisco, and Seattle, and currently resides in San Diego.
Tom Fruin
New York
Tom Fruin was born in 1974 in Los Angeles, California. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Working with plexiglass, steel, plastic, and scrap materials, Tom Fruin takes on urban objects such as houses, billboards, and flags, elevating their form to emblematic status and architectural scale. Fruin collects sign shop offcuts and brightly-hued plexiglass pieces throughout Chinatown, which he then weaves into striated grids. Illuminated from within and constructed in municipal locales, Fruin’s works dim to their own internal rhythms, becoming beacons of color and temples of light that dot skylines and community parks around the world, such as his re-interpretations of now-iconic Brooklyn Water Towers. His work is a part of many international museums and collections, most notably The Hanck Collection at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany; the Richard J. Massey Foundation for Arts and Sciences in New York, NY; and the Buenos Aires Design Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
WAN-JEN CHEN
Taiwan
Born in 1982, Chen Wan-Jen graduated from the Fine Arts Department of National Taiwan University of Arts. He uses continuous loop video to create feelings of absurdity and humor. For his earlier work, he filmed pedestrians, then used image editing software to erase the background around each figure, and finally placed the figures into the same video. In some works, the moment before some disaster strikes repeatedly appears, imparting the work with a perilous atmosphere. In these works, the artist focuses on digital society’s apathetic and repetitive psychological state. His characters endlessly move as if they are hastening toward some unknown event that harbors infinite possibilities. Chen received the Grand Prize of the Taipei Arts Award in 2006, and attended a residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York in 2012. His work has been exhibited in New York, Berlin, Saint Petersburg, Tokyo, and at major museums and art spaces in Taiwan, as well as in other locations. Chen is an outstanding, high-profile video art creator.