James Zhang

James Zhang is the CEO and founder of The Concept Art House, which leverages teams on either side of the Pacific to deliver the best of both worlds – California creativity, with Chinese scalability.

James has been on the cutting edge of digital entertainment for nearly two decades. Since its founding in 2007, James has built Concept Art House into one of the video game industry’s most celebrated art services companies, and continues to establish lasting partnerships with industry powerhouses such as Activision/Blizzard, 2K, Tencent, Kabam, Netease, and Supercell.

He additionally serves on several Advisory Boards including: 1World Online, a crowdsource service that combines social polling with analytics, Redemption Games, a leading casual game developer, Waygate, an interactive VR content platform and Wistla, a social activities mobile app.

As the current CEO and founder of The Concept Art House, James Zhang has helped to ship 600+ games as of 2018 alone, with many of them reaching top rankings in iTunes, Google Play, Steam and console marketplaces. Beginning with their work helping to launch social gaming and continuing through to our present day VR and connected play work, we’re proud of our successful track record of bringing new types of games to market. At The Concept Art House, James Zhang leads a team of world-class art directors, dedicated producers, and talented artists.

Prior to Concept Art House, James was Art Director at Factor 5 where he led the artistic development of Lair – a PlayStation 3 launch title – and was a concept artist on Star Wars and other bestselling LucasArts Entertainment franchises.

James Zhang has made appearances in different media. Recently, he was interviewed by openbusinesscouncil.org and citiesabc.com founder Dinis Guarda, whereas he said the following about the future of digital art:

“So there’s a lot of great talks about this. For me, there’s a couple of transformative moments. Lemme give an example: When I was an artist working on Blizzard, I would draw something by hand, right? I’m old. When I finished that drawing, Blizzard was okay, and Dungeons & Dragons was okay. For me, it’s just to sell that original piece of art. Since almost most of the people in my space are digital, they had no way of selling that digital piece of art. Because, it’s just a jpeg. It’s just a tiff, right? The blockchain technology is a public ledger that attaches unique code to digital art, and that changes everything, because if you’re a digital artist, you can now provide uniqueness. You know, if you go to any art gallery, if they have a Picasso etching, it might be one of fifty one or one hundred. If it was unlimited, it’d just be a poster. So, that’s just one entry point into this. And then, if you’re a collector of some kind, I used to collect comic books, and like this is a pack of ‘Magic: The Gathering’ cards, same thing. If you think about sports collectibles, now they’re digital collectibles. And people are like what you’re playing, how much money for digital collectibles, why? I would respond by saying well, how much do you think, in America where baseball cards like Ken Griffey Jr. baseball cards, how much is that worth to you? And they would say, well, I don’t know, probably, a lot of money. Micheal Jordan, Ricky card, how much is that? Well, it’s just a piece of cardboard! No, if it’s authentic, people will pay money for it, because it’s scarce. So, the technology allows artists to create scarce digital content, and that is transformative.”

Zhang has done interior illustrations on a number of Dungeons & Dragons books for Wizards of the Coast, including Sharn: City of Towers (2004), the Eberron Campaign Setting (2004), Monster Manual III (2004), Races of the Wild (2005), Races of Eberron (2005), Five Nations (2005), Tome of Magic: Pact, Shadow, and Truename Magic (2006), Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells (2006), and Drow of the Underdark (2007). He also did the cover art for Crucible of Chaos (2008) from Paizo Publishing’s GameMaster line.

Zhang has done interior illustrations on a number of Dungeons & Dragons books for Wizards of the Coast, including Sharn: City of Towers (2004), the Eberron Campaign Setting (2004), Monster Manual III (2004), Races of the Wild (2005), Races of Eberron (2005), Five Nations (2005), Tome of Magic: Pact, Shadow, and Truename Magic (2006), Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells (2006), and Drow of the Underdark (2007). He also did the cover art for Crucible of Chaos (2008) from Paizo Publishing’s GameMaster line.