Huang Yan (artist)

Huang Yan (born 1966 in Jilin province, China) is a multimedia artist, Taoist, and businessman based in Beijing.

Both Feng Boyi and Ai Weiwei noticed his artwork, including it in their controversial Fuck Off exhibition in 2000 in Shanghai.

[2] Huang started his career as a poet and was recognized as an artist who used creative mediums such as the human body, ox bones, busts of Mao Zedong, flowers, musical instruments and old communist uniforms.

Painting them on body parts not only makes it avant-garde, but it is a new way of using traditional Chinese art and of representing the relationship between man and nature, a very Taoist concept.

One of his photographs includes a painted woman running across the Great Wall of China, a very provocative act in Chinese culture.

He created a series of porcelain portraits of Mao Zedong, but these were stopped by the authorities before they could leave the country to be a part of an exhibition in Paris, France.

[7] By using controversial art mediums, Huang is challenging the limits of Chinese traditional landscape paintings.

Other Chinese artists such as Cang Xin, Li Wei, Liu Ren, Ma Yanling and Wu Yuren, are also using the human body as an art medium to explore contemporary Chinese art: "Some photos are humorous, others disconcerting, but all are fascinating reflections of life in China today.

"[citation needed] Cang Xin, for example, uses his own tongue to taste places that represent Chinese culture in a series called Experiences of the Tongue, while Ma Yanling features photos with women bound in silk ribbons in a series titled Silk Ribbons.