Huang Yan

黃 岩


Painter, photographer, *1970 Jilin province , lives Beijing and teaches at Changchun University


Huang Yan is a multimedia artist, Zen-Buddhist, and businessman based in Beijing. He graduated from the Changchun Normal Academy in 1987, and is currently a lecturer at Changchun University.
Wikipedia

In 1999, when Huang Yan began a series of paintings-photographs entitled 'Chinese Landscapes' – landscapes painted on the skin of a human body – his work was immediately noticed by Feng Boyi and Ai Weiwei, who selected several prints for their pivotal and explosive exhibition 'Fuck Off' in Shanghai in 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. Huang Yan’s work makes reference to a Chinese cultural heritage that is innate to every Chinese. Since the earliest paintings of the Han dynasty and the apotheosis of landscape painting during the Song dynasty, landscape paintings have been the quintessence of Chinese art. Huang breaks this heritage giving it a new direction, by transposing it onto the human body, the human body that was very rarely used in the ancient culture of painting, but that has played a very important role in the development of contemporary art in China since the end of the 1970s.
Chinese Contemporary



山水, Shanshui, Mountains and Water, 'Landscape', front and back, 2001



Spring


Summer


Autumn


Winter

四季, siji, Four Seasons, 2005, photos Chinese Contemporary

In 2006 Huang became emboldened, embedding nude female bodies in romantic, modern landscapes




Bodyscape, 2007
體景觀 = Body Scenery View, Ti jing guan
Imitating Gu Wenda I tried to coin a literal,
non-phonetic translation of 'Bodyscape'


Ballet dancer, 2006




Bodyscape with boots, 2007
photos Chinese Tools

Huang Yan and Family 2007, photo Red Gate Gallery
Huang is Manchu and therefore allowed to have more than one child; his wife is also a painter