Chen Fei likes to paint bad taste. He believes the not-so-pretty things leave a longer lasting impression than beauty ever would. What impresses him most are the rogues, not the upstanding citizens. He was trained at the Beijing Film Academy, found the industry too limiting, and turned to acrylic on canvas instead — treating every painting like a film still, rendered with photographic precision that reads as digital or animated until you get close. He was at Centre Pompidou in 2024. Galerie Perrotin represents him. He is not yet a household name outside contemporary art circles. That is the point.

Caroline Tomlinson spent 15 years as a designer and art director before making the shift she'd been circling for years — full-time fashion illustration. Central Saint Martins graduate, collaborator with Rankin, Dior and Louboutin, and a committed believer in happy accidents. This is a conversation about lines, marks, and what it means to let the ink lead.

She watched her grandmother weave in Turkey. Then she put rubber tubing and acrylic dowels through the same loom. Desire Moheb-Zandi — Berlin-born, Istanbul-raised, New York-marching — on textile art as feminist statement, the loom as analogue computer, and why we need activists more than ever.

Photo Cristina Macaya