Yang Mian was born in 1970 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province of China. He was brought up with traditional aesthetic teaching. In 1997, he graduated from Department of Oil Painting in Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, then he has been teaching at Southwest Jiaotong University till now. He had rewarded the annual prize of Chinese Contemporary Art Association (CCAA) (Chinese Contemporary Art Association, Switzerland) for 1998–1999.
Read MoreYang Mian's research always focus on the crucial cultural topic which is the impact of media on the Chinese society. From 1996 to 2005, he crested oil painting series 'Beauty Standard' to discuss the issue of Chinese society's aesthetic attitude to the female. In the period of 2007-2008 Yang Mian created a series of painting called 'Be in China-The Revolution of Culture'. The works took western popular culture as material to do pluralistic creation. Beginning with the 'CMYK' series in 2008, Yang Mian has accessed classical images among art history as the object of image diverting and made his experimental method a kind of graphical text establishment full of cultural reconstruction sense. CMYK colour mode is widely used in today's printing industrial technique. All complex images are emerged in the composition of 'C' (cyan), 'M' (magenta), 'Y' (yellow), 'K' (black). The artist downloaded the classic paintings from the internet and enlarged them to find the distribution and the arrangement of the four colours, then got an independent new picture by reducing the density of the colour arrangement. The artist believes that no matter how complex and mysterious the details of the classic works are, the main character is still 'CMYK' and it decides their appearance and attractiveness in the way of spreading. Since a series of works constructed by pure and enlarged 'CMYK' structure have presented to us, the following images and results will change our existed understanding and thoughts to images.
Yang Mian's works have been exhibited by a lot of important domestic and oversea artistic institutions and have been collected by some important organisations including Chinese Contemporary Art Association (Switzerland), De Young Art Museum (San Francisco, USA), The Montpellier City Hall (France), Kunst 88 Museum(Netherland), Novartis (Basel, Switzerland), Square Gallery of Contemporary Art (Nanjing, China), Shenzhen Art Museum (Shenzhen, China), Upriver Gallery (Chengdu, China) and other private art collectors. He had also published Beauty (standard), 2003 Yang Mian's view of (standard), 2005 Yang Mian's view of (standard), Those classic - Exhibition of Yang Mian's new work, Gesture 2007-2008, CMYK - Yang Mian's painting and other art catalogues. Famous art historian Lv Peng also edited The Standard and Concept of Vision - Yang Mian's art for him.
Text courtesy A Thousand Plateaus Art Space.
