Artist Uses Modern Techniques to Preserve a Traditional Chinese Art Form

 

Yang Yongliang is a Chinese artist and photographer from Shanghai. Born in 1980, he studied calligraphy and traditional Chinese landscape painting from an early age until graduating from the China Academy of Fine Art where he now teaches. His bio on White Rabbit summarizes Yongliang’s thoughts adeptly:

A longtime student and devotee of shanshui, or landscape painting, Yang Yongliang has watched in dismay as a China hell-bent on modernisation tosses its traditions on the scrap heap. But there is no way to stop this 21st-century anticultural revolution, he says—older art forms must keep up with the changing times or fade away. Yang Yongliang’s approach to saving shanshui is based on retaining its inner essence while updating its subjects and media… They also parallel the ‘despair and sadness’ Yang Yongliang feels when he contemplates what is being lost as Shanghai erupts into the 21st century.

 

Yongliang photographs cityscapes that serve as raw materials for his images. He then alters them in Photoshop, blending them into fantasy landscapes that evoke the traditional Chinese landscape paintings of the past. To see more, be sure visit his official website. There is also a video interview with Yongliang embedded at the bottom of the post that delves deeper into his thoughts and process.

[via Galerie Paris-Beijing, Slate, Lenscratch, White Rabbit Collection]