Cool Hunting

Huang Yan is a Chinese painter. One of his preferred mediums is the human body, upon which he often paints one of his favorite themes, landscapes, and often as performance art which is then photographed. The artist says that 'landscape is an abode in which my mortal body can reside, landscape is my rejection of worldly wrangling, landscape is a release for my Buddhist ideas.'

Chinese Contemporary gallery writes "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 person. Since the earliest paintings of the Han dynasty and the apotheosis of the theorization of landscape painting during the Song dynasty, landscape paintings have become the quintessence of Chinese art. Yet the artist breaks this heritage at the same time as 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."

More images and information after the jump.

See more of his work at the Red Gate gallery, including paintings on porcelain.

See his biography at the Marabella Beijing gallery website.

Selections from the Four Seasons series.