Heavenly City. Yang Yongliang

Yang Yongliang is a young artist from Shanghai who studied traditional Chinese art such as "shui mo painting" and calligraphy from his early age. His teacher was Yang Yang who is the professor of traditional art at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Yang Yongliang cleverly recreated "Cun", the main representation of Chinese Shanshui paintings by using a camera, the contemporary visual device, to express his creativity for the subjects he is concerned with. He combined the traditional Chinese paintings with the modern Shanghai city life and the details reveal current urban culture. The scenes of construction sites, large cranes, traffic signs and fly-overs those all Shanghai citizens are familiar with and all have become critical elements in his artworks. These common objects can be found everywhere in Shanghai, Yang Yongliang has arranged them to fit into the traditional Chinese Paintings' composition. When watching the photographic works at a distance, they are dreamlike Shanshui paintings. On the contrary when looking at them closely, they become shockingly modern city views. He perfectly handles the contradictions between ephemeral and solid, vigor and gentle, sparse and bold, beauty and ugly so as to make the entire picture poetically harmonious, but the details are 'blots on the landscape'. He successfully achieves a perfect balance between fragility and danger, beauty and cruelty. He brings the viewers not only visual enjoyment, but also the contemplation and self-examination of the various social and cultural concerns.

His work has been shown in exhibitions worldwide.


"A child looked up at the sky and thought to himself, “What does that cloud look like? A monkey, or a stone lion?” In ancient times, there existed the idea of Taihu Scholar's Stones, which were rough, thin, porous and permeable stones with holes. And then there were also traditional ornamental columns. What would we, as contemporaries, see?" - Yang Yongliang.