Tianzhuo Chen was born in 1985, and he currently lives and works in Beijing, China. After graduating from Central Saint Martins in London, he received his master’s degree in fine art from the Chelsea College of Arts in London.

Chen skillfully works between the artistic disciplines of installation, performance, video, painting, and photography, but he also creates events that require the participation of viewers or other people, such as underground parties, theater performances, or more precisely constructed ritual sites, to realize their transformation into dreamworlds. He assimilates elements and symbols from religion (e.g., Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and shamanism), subcultures (e.g., cult followings, drag shows, and raves), popular culture (e.g., cartoons, hip hop, and electronic music), and dance (e.g., butoh and vogueing) into his work, in the hopes that the viewer or participant will transcend the surface state of the body and spirit through that ambience and achieve what the artist calls a “state of madness.”

Recent solo exhibitions include “Trance” (M Woods Museum, Beijing, 2019), “GHOST” (Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winterthur, 2017), “Ishvara” (Long March Space, Beijing, 2016), “Chen Tianzhuo” (chi K11 Art Museum, Shanghai, 2016), and “Tianzhuo Chen” (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2015).

33EMYBW is a Shanghai-based producer and visual artist. She draws inspiration from modern dance music, ethnic music, and rich visuals, distilling multiple conceptual elements into characteristic bass rhythms and surprising experimental sound design. In 2018, her album Golem, released on SVBKVLT, was named one of the best electronic albums of the year on Bandcamp, and received praise from producers and DJs such as Kode9, Desto, Akito, and 8ulentina. In 2019, she participated in Nyege Nyege (Kampala) and the opening of the Warehouse Project (Manchester), curated by Aphex Twin. That same year, her third album Arthropods premiered at Unsound Festival (Krakow). The new album, released on SVBKVLT, continued her previous explorations of post-humanity and evolution, and experimented with rhythms over longer timeframes. Resident Advisor and FACT Magazine named Arthropods one of the best albums of the year, and FACT Magazine also called it one of the hundred best albums of the decade. She has worked with artists including Weirdcore, Marija Bozinovska Jones, Aisha Devi, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander. 33EMYBW has also participated in important music festivals and interdisciplinary collaborations, including the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), SXSW (Austin), as well as CTM (Berlin), Soft Centre (Sydney), and Recombinant (San Francisco) in 2019.

In 2019, she curated DONG, a project that re-envisions Dong culture through field surveys, music, publications, and exhibitions. She fused the traditional songs of the Dong people of Guizhou into her sound design, and the release of her album DONG2 on Merrie Records attracted attention for its novel reshaping of traditional culture.