Huang Yan (artist)

Huang Yan (artist)

Huang Yan (born 1966 in Jilin province) is a multimedia artist, Taoist, business man, painter, sculptor, photographer and performance artist based in Beijing. He graduated from the Changchun Normal Academy in 1987, and is currently a lecturer at Changchun University.

Like many of the recent internationally recognized artists from China, Huang Yan conflates aspects of China’s rich traditional art with contemporary global art practices. His photos of models, painted in traditional Chinese landscape, combine one of the great Chinese art forms fused with body art.

Huang Yan has become a major figure in the Chinese contemporary art movement. He is recognized as a gifted artist who can "move effortlessly across a wide field of media and scale." Besides using photography and the human body, Huang Yan also creates sculptures to paint on as well. "For his wide range of outstanding work in sculpture, painting, photography and now printmaking, Huang Yan is destined to remain as one of the most important and popular Chinese artists on today's international stage."

In 1999, Huang Yan began a new series of paintings/photographs of traditional Chinese paintings of landscapes on the human body, called Chinese Landscapes. Both Feng Boyi and Ai Weiwei noticed his artwork, and they even used some of his art in their controversial Fuck Off exhibition in Shanghai (2000). "Very few artists, in expressing the encounter between Chinese traditional culture and the contemporary world, have succeeded in simultaneously capturing the fusion and the paradox that this encounter generates." His art can relate to Chinese people and their culture, even though it is still considered contemporary art. The landscape paintings he uses come from the Song Dynasty, which is what most consider the most "Chinese-looking." What makes his art interesting is that the human body was seldom used in ancient Chinese art, which is what makes this art very contemporary.