AIR_MCUBE International Artists' Residency 2025
RESIDENCY ARTIST OF NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER
Chenxi Xu
China
Chenxi Xu works across multiple disciplines while keeping painting at the core of her practice. Her practice spans painting, enamel, and performance, and engages with colour, form, mood, coherence, and the expressive potential of inscriptions. She has taken her painting and enamel works to significant exhibitions across China and Europe, continually expanding her visual language. In recent years, she has held multiple exhibitions of painting and digital drawing in London and Beijing. Across these practices, her work begins from painting and develops through dialogues across different media, moving toward a balance of coherence and creativity, with each domain nourishing and supporting the others.
Within an aesthetics that embraces the fluidity of creativity and allows culture to grow freely, Xu seeks to embody this sense of movement, exploring the spiritual connections between fast and slow, relaxed and intense, rhythm and gaps, inferiority and resonance. Her practice reflects multiple memory systems of Chinese culture, including the monochrome tradition, the poetics of nature, the continuity of mind and matter, and approaches to representing emptiness, while opening new possibilities for refinement that link contemporary practice with the profound and elusive traditions of the past.
RESIDENCY ARTIST of October
Christine Mace is a New York City-based artist. As a self-taught social documentary photographer, her work focuses on humanizing the other and capturing fleeting moments of authentic connection among people, spaces, and communities. Her work is deeply tied to her struggles with being put into a box and the feelings of being unseen.
In 2019, her series ‘Dominoes in Havana’ received the First Place Winner award in the Black and White Category from the jurors of the 14th Julia Margaret Cameron Awards. Mace’s photography has been exhibited across the United States and internationally.
Sacred City
RESIDENCY ARTIST OF September
Vera Ni | CHINA
Vera Ni graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, China. After graduation, she worked in the Chinese contemporary art industry as a designer, while gradually returning to her true passion—painting. Her recent practice explores the concept of “emptiness,” translating this philosophy into the language of contemporary art. During her residency in Nepal, she is developing new works that engage deeply with the country’s rich artistic heritage and cultural context. Her exhibitions include Art Power Online Festival (China, 2025), UP UP UP at Pata Gallery (Shanghai, 2022), and Excellent Works Exhibition (Shanghai, 2011).
Mirage Mirage: Glaze of Light
RESIDENCY ARTIST OF AUGUST
Runveer Rawoo | Mauritius
Runveer Rawoo is a Mauritian Artist, Artivist, and Art Educator whose work explores inner consciousness and our connection to nature. Instigator of Conscious Art Movement alongside with Sadhguru’s Save Soil initiative, his art advocates ecological awareness and mindful living. His upcoming solo exhibition, *Introspection*, reflects themes of self-awareness, unity, and environmental stewardship, using sustainable materials. Runveer’s practice fosters inner awakening to inspire societal and ecological transformation. His art combines introspection with activism, aiming to ignite collective responsibility for a sustainable.
RESIDENCY ARTIST OF JULY
Peter Makela | USA
Peter Makela is an internationally recognized artist and Assistant Professor of Art in the Division of Arts at Edgewood University in Madison, Wisconsin. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008 and his MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018.
A 2022 Fulbright Student Researcher to Nepal, he has lived and traveled widely throughout the Himalayas and has exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently showing his work at a large solo exhibit at the Patan Museum in Nepal. His paintings are included in many private and public collections, including those of Jean Louis Bourgeois and Johns Hopkins University.
RESIDENCY ARTIST OF JUNE
Jung Ji Young | South Korea
Jung Ji Young (정지영), born in 2001, is a South Korean artist who is set to graduate with a degree in Fine Art from Kaywon University of Art & Design in Gyeonggi in 2025. In 2025, she held her first solo exhibition titled The Floters at GONG TOU. Her group exhibition history reflects a dynamic and growing artistic presence. In 2024, she participated in several shows including An Unbounded Gaze and There’s Someone Here! Hello? at GONG TOU and Kuma Museum of Art respectively in Yeongdeungpo and Uiwang; Take-off Point also at the Kuma Museum of Art; Mission at the Baekdudaegan National Arboretum in Bonghwa-gun; Wet at Gallery Naemamdaero in Suwon; and Bogugot Layered Space, I really like this story…展 at the Bogugot Small Art Museum in Gimpo. In 2023, she was part of A Paper Plane at GONG TOU in Yeongdeungpo, marking the beginning of her public exhibition journey.
Resilience
RESIDENCY ARTIST OF JUNE
Lee Dawon | South Korea
Lee Dawon (이다원), born in 2002, is a South Korean artist who graduated with a degree in Fine Art from Kaywon University of Art & Design in Gyeonggi in 2023. She has actively participated in several group exhibitions that reflect her evolving artistic practice. In 2023, she showcased her work in It-item at Gallery Naemamdaero in Suwon and A Paper Plane at Gong Tou in Seoul. Her participation continued in 2024 with exhibitions such as Hello? at KUMA Gallery in Uiwang, Mission at Baekdudaegan National Arboretum in Gyeongsangbuk-do, and Layered Space at the Small Art Museum Bogugot in Gimpo.
“My art is always inspired by other cultures as it is created at the spot. Art that never would have come into existence if I would not had made the journey”
I am here, Where are You?
RESIDENCY ARTIST OF MAY
Herve Alexandre | France
With over 40 years of artistic practice, Herve Alexandre began their journey as a teenager at Interflight Studio in Miami, creating caricatures and comic strips. Extensive travels soon redirected their focus toward portraiture, cultural diversity, and environmental themes. Their vibrant, expressive works reflect a commitment to preserving cultural heritage, environmental beauty, and promoting art education. Known for bold colors and dynamic compositions, Herve explores subjects ranging from global communities to upcycled land art. Recent residencies include Art Junction (India, 2024), National Center of Aesthetics (Armenia, 2024), Kuyam Baa (Senegal, 2024), and Gallery MCube (Nepal, 2025). They frequently create series devoted to social and ecological causes and engage in collaborative projects through international artist collectives. Their works, rooted in experimentation and movement, have been featured in over 150 exhibitions across more than 50 countries. Herve continues to use art as a transformative tool for dialogue, preservation, and collective creativity.
Big & Small
RESIDENCY ARTIST OF APRIL
Lindy Bishop | USA
Lindy is a self-taught 21st century American contemporary impressionist painter with a subject concentration on rural landscapes in a variety of US locations and around the world. Her distinctive style stretches the boundaries between realism and abstraction with elements of whimsy and an expressive contemporary sense of color and shape. Bishop’s work explores wholesome themes inherent in the land and people of rural areas wherever she may be— in her midwestern homeland surroundings of freshwater lakes, rivers, orchards and farm fields and in small towns across the globe.
In Nepal, Lindy is drawn to entrepreneurship, the mountainous landscape, color, kids and survivors. And, the amazing Dhaka fabric patterns. Her large-scale paintings are emerging in the MCube Studio as she begins her residency.
Bishop’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions and galleries, primarily in the Midwest United States. Through her work she hopes to inspire hope and empathy as she continues to explore the world.
RESIDENCY ARTIST OF FEBRUARY / MARCH
Ben Rook | UK
Originally from Brighton, England, Ben Rook is a British-Australian photographer and writer. After working in corporate IT for 20+ years, the allure of a creative life became too much. To support this change of direction, he studied Documentary Photography & Reportage at the Instituto Europeo di Design (IED) in Madrid (2020) and Freelance & Feature Writing at the London School of Journalism (2020-21). Now, along with his wife (Angela), he leads a life of indefinite long-term travel with photography as his north star. While on the road, he uses a social documentary approach and mostly unposed scenes to inform the narratives and concepts that interest him. At Gallery Mcube, he is working on a project that explores the illusion of normality and how subjective experience is all that matters.