Contemporary art is difficult. Who in the world is it and how is it valued?
If you have ever tried to learn about contemporary art, you may have had such a puzzling experience.
Read the "100 People for Understanding Contemporary Art" series to get a comprehensive overview of the major national and international players in the art world.

15. Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger is a conceptual artist who is credited with influencing the street brand Supreme, with its very famous logo of white letters on a red background.
Her work is known for a style that combines critical phrases with black and white photography.
She claims that she chose this style due to "our ability to determine who we are and who we are not.
Kruger's artwork was the basis for the brand Supreme's logo design, but an ironic situation has arisen where one serves as a critique of consumerism and the other as a symbol of consumption.

16. Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei is one of China's leading dissident artists. Despite being arrested and detained by the Chinese government, Ai Weiwei is famous for continuing to create provocative works while based in Europe and the United States.
Ai Weiwei is a diverse artist, working as an activist, architect, painter, poet, and contemporary artist.
He is also known for his architectural design of the main stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, known as the "Bird's Nest. Ironically, however, he was absent from the opening ceremony, bitterly criticizing the Chinese government's use of the Olympics for political propaganda. Since then, he has been under intense scrutiny by the authorities.

17. Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford, born in Los Angeles in 1961, is a contemporary artist known for his large-scale abstract paintings on paper.
Bradford has created a unique artistic style using everyday materials and tools, such as those found in a hardware store.
His work is also referred to as "social abstraction.
Based on the concept that meaning is embedded in all materials and techniques prior to their artistic usefulness, he creates overwhelming works by layering, collaging, and further shaving various types of paper, including maps, billboards, movie posters, and comic books.

18. njideka Akunyili Crosby

Njideka Akunyili Crosby is a Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based visual artist.
Crosby's work focuses on bridging the cultural terrain of her two lands: the United States, where she immigrated, and Nigeria, where she was born and raised.
She uses a combination of collage and painting to create large-scale two-dimensional works.

19. marina Abramović

Marina Abramović is a legendary artist and the father of performance art.
She is best known for her "Relationworks," a body of work that she presented with her partner Ulai.
In the 1980 work "Energy of Rest," Ulai pulls a bow with an arrow aimed at Marina's heart, while Marina supports the bow and the two balance each other.
Ulai could easily kill Marina by releasing the arrow, and the situation, which would be stable if the two were in balance with each other's strength, but as soon as that balance is broken, a catastrophe occurs, seems to symbolize the danger of the society we live in and human relationships.

20. Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is a painter who creates paintings with a figurative yet abstract appeal by depicting distorted human bodies with vivid brushwork.
In her work, she has been interested in and studied the "imperfection" of the body, which is full of social implications and taboos.
She has observed corpses in the morgue, animal flesh, studied classical and Renaissance sculpture, and painted entwined couples, children and mothers, and bodies with hermaphroditic bodies.

21. Cecily Brown

Cecily Brown is an English-born painter. She is famous for her paintings, which are painted in a painterly style that evokes influences such as Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon, and Joan Mitchell.
He is known for his style of depicting physical sensations and erotic motifs distorted to the point where the shapes are almost unrecognizable.
He has participated in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and has had successful solo exhibitions at major museums around the world.

22. Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor.
Inspired by the poetry of Paul Czeran, he makes large-scale works that reference the Jewish concentration camps, a symbol of Nazi Germany's history and oppression.
He is an artist who creates works inspired by taboos that have been committed by mankind and incidents in modern history that are still controversial.