Yang Yong graduated from the Sichuan Art institute (Chongqing, China) in 1995. He moved to Shenzhen in the early 1990s and he currently lives and works in Shenzhen and Beijing, China. With photography, installation and painting, Yang Yong is firmly recounting the stories of his own generation, born in the 1970s and grown up in the process of China’s opening and urbanisation.
Yang Yong’s photographic work was first exhibited outside of China in 1999 at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art’s (Helsinki, Finland) showing of Cities of the Move. Later that year the first solo exhibition of his photographic work was held in the Boarhers bookstore in Guangzhou. It was titled Women are Beautiful Always and Forever. In 2000 his work was included in Fuck Off, a satellite exhibition to the Shanghai Biennale (Shanghai, China). In 2002, his work was shown in Pause: 4th Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju, Korea). In 2003, an installation by Yang Yong was included in a special exhibition at the 50th Venice Biennale entitled Z.O.U. (Zone Of Urgency) and his photographs were exhibited in the 34th Rencontresd’Arles (Arles, Flance). Also in 2003, Yang Yong’s first work of public sculpture was included in The Fifth System, Public Art in the Age of Post-Planning, a project of Shenzhen’s Hexiangning Art Gallery. His photography was exhibited in 2004 in the Kunstmuseum (Wolfsburg, Germany) exhibition, The Chinese, as well as in the San Diego Museum of Art and International Center of Photography. New York. In 2005, Yang Yong’s photographs were featured in the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial (Guangzhou). In 2006, his work was shown in the Museum Boijmans van Beunigen (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) exhibition, China. In the same year, in Francesco Bonami’s exhibition All Look Same at the Fondazione Sandre, Turino, Italy.
Text courtesy Tang Contemporary Art.
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