b. 1956 in Foshan, Guangdong Province, China; lives and works in Paris, France, and Ittlingen, Germany

Yang Jiechang’s artistic practice as a calligrapher-painter turned global social actor inverts the contemporary Chinese art world norm of using Western avant-garde forms to critique contemporary Chinese society. He accomplishes this by adopting the performative expressivity of the traditional brush and the paradoxical dialectics of pre-modern Daoist skeptics to expose the underlying social and cultural forces that shape our contemporary global reality.

In 1989 he participated in both the seminal Contemporary Chinese Artexhibition at the National Art Museum in Beijing and the equally paradigm-changing exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou where he created his artworks on site. Since then Yang has exhibition widely throughout Europe and Asia and was featured in both the China Avant-garde exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (1993) and in the 50th  edition of the Venice Biennale (2003). In the past five years, Yang’s work has been included in numerous international exhibitions, including the Lyon Biennial (Lyon, 2009), Qui a peur des artistes? Une sélection d’oeuvres de la Fondation François Pinault (Musée de Dinard, Dinard, 2009), Hareng Saur: Ensor et Contemparain (MSK and S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium, 2010), The World Belongs to You  (Palazzo Grassi, Fondation F. Pinault, Venice, 2011), Reactivation – Shanghai Biennale (Shanghai, 2012), Yuandao (Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 2013) and Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China (Metropolitan Museum, New York, 2013-2014, and most recently Advance through Retreat (Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2014).  For his solo exhibition at Ink Studio in May 2014, This Is Still Landscape Painting, Yang concludes his Tales of the Eleventh Day series in which he explores the transcendence of all categories and inaugurates his latest inquiries on moral cultivation based on the paintings and sketches by a young Adolf Hitler.

Among other places, Yang’s work can be found in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley; The World Bank, Washington; Rockefeller Foundation, New York; Ministry of Culture, France; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong; Hong Kong University Art Museum, Hong Kong; Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou; Chengdu Museum of Art, Chengdu; Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, Shenzhen; Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka; Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art, Kyongju, Korea; Museum for Arts and Crafts, Hamburg; Annie Wong Art Foundation, Vancouver; Swatch Collection, Switzerland; François Pinault Foundation, France; Ullens Foundation, Switzerland; Yageo Art Foundation, Taiwan; and Eslite Inc., Taiwan.