Huang Yan’s body painting series “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.
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 curators of the highest regard, including 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. [...] 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.
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