Contemporary Chinese artist Huang Yan ‘tattoos’ Song dynasty-style landscapes on human bodies

Beijing-based multimedia artist Huang Yan is showing in Hong Kong this month, blending photography, painting and performance in works indebted to both the past and present.

Born in 1966 in China’s northeastern Jilin province, the mountains of which have greatly influenced his works, Huang started out as a poet. In the early 1990s, he began exploring connections between traditional and contemporary art, and man and nature, using ox bones, busts of Mao Zedong, musical instruments and old communist uniforms as his canvases. But it was the detailed landscapes painted on human bodies, including his own, that grabbed global attention.

The Song dynasty-style landscapes were not painted by Huang, however, but by his wife, the classically trained painter Zhang Tiemei. The resulting photographic prints are considered the final artworks, raising debate as to whether the body or the painting is at their heart.

“I recreated the narratives hidden in landscapes, flowers and plants, and natural sceneries painted by Tao Yuanming, a literatus from the Six Dynasties period [220-589], on my own flesh,” says Huang, adding that wearing landscapes on the skin is a reminder of the importance of Chinese artistic heritage.

“As the body moves aesthetically, the painted subject takes another shape. In other words, my Chinese Shan-shui Tattoo photography collection creates a visual effect similar to ancient Chinese hand-scroll painting,” he says.

Huang has courted his fair share of controversy over the years. In 2014, some of his Mao busts were stopped from leaving China on their way to an exhibition in Paris, because, authorities said, they disrespected the communist leader.