This August, just in time for the Olympics, the U.S. will open a brand new embassy in Beijing. The $550m complex, designed by the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, will be one of the State Department’s largest foreign construction projects to date. To mark the occasion, the State Department plans to display master works by 18 American and Chinese contemporary artists.

Beginning August 8 — the official embassy unveiling — American and Chinese dignitaries will stroll corridors graced by the works of such luminaries as Jeff Koons, Cai Guo-Qiang, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Rausch-enberg, Betty Woodman, Martin Puryear, Maya Lin, Yun-Fei Ji, and Hai Bo.

Below, get to know the works and lives of a few of these contemporary legends.

Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons was born in 1955, and has been making art critics and audiences applaud, giggle, cringe and fume since the late ’70s with his enormous and often goofy sculptures (pictured: “Amore” 1988). See a slideshow of Koons’ work…

Louise Bourgeois

Born in Paris in 1938, Louise Bourgeois emigrated to the United States and continued her studies at the Art Students League in New York. Though her beginnings were as an engraver and painter, by the 1940s she had turned her attention to sculpture, for which she is now recognized as a twentieth-century leader. See a slideshow of Bourgeous’ sculptures…

Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg’s enthusiasm for popular culture and his rejection of the angst and seriousness of the Abstract Expressionists led him to search for a new way of painting. He found his signature mode by embracing materials traditionally outside of the artist’s reach. Sadly, Rauschenberg passed away last week. Watch interviews with the late master…

Martin Puryear

Martin Puryear’s objects and public installations — in wood, stone, tar, wire, and various metals — are a marriage of Minimalist logic with traditional craftsmanship. Puryear’s evocative, dreamlike explorations in abstract forms retain vestigial elements of utility from everyday objects found in the world. See Martin Puryear at work…

Maya Lin

Maya Lin catapulted into the public eye when, as a senior at Yale University, she submitted the winning design in a national competition for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial to be built in Washington, D.C. Discover more of Maya Lin’s graceful landscape art, and read about her personal journey as an artist.

Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang has exploded — quite literally — the accepted parameters of art making in our time. See his recent exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York. Further information and video of his process is on Art 21.