YANG ZHICHAO
b.1963 Gansu, China. Lives and works in Beijing, China. Yang is a renowned Chinese performance artist. Considered one of the most extreme performance artists in China, and perhaps globally, he uses his body as a tool to draw on social issues linking the individual with the world. Many of his performances involve painful acts such as branding and surgical processes. Personal pain has become a part of his experience and a means of communication to engage the larger world.
In his recent work Chinese Bible, Yang has focused on a new art form linking China’s past in order to understand its future. The artist spent three years collecting from second-hand shops the personal diaries of overlapping generations from China. The 3,000 notebooks inscribed with personal writings span 50 years from 1949 to1999. The writings reach deep into the very essence of feelings among the Chinese whether emotional, political or even mundane during a half-century of monumentally changing times.
23 May - 30 Jun, 2013
10 Chancery Lane Gallery presents PARALLEL LIVES: Hong Kong and China by Yang Zhichao and Douglas Young. Coincidentally, they have the same name in Chinese and are born within a couple years of each other. The exhibition explores the relationship of these two artists, who have never met, and their lives in the context of the history in which they were brought up between China and Hong Kong. Their work is a reflection of their personal as well as communal collective memories.
10 Nov - 02 Dec, 2011 10 Chancery Lane Gallery
Renowned Chinese artist Yang Zhichao is best known for his extreme performance art works, which draw on individual and social issues. Yang’s art is bold and direct and they confront the problems we encounter in life and seek to connect individual experience to the environment we live in. His body is his art. Performance to him is a documentation of our existence. His works do not just bring a visually shocking and painful experience to the audience, they are also full of wisdom and irony.
