Person
Artist
Shang Yang
尚扬
Date of birth
1942
Place Of birth
Hubei, China
Biography
Shang Yang was born in 1942 in Hubei Province, but his familial origins lie in Kaixian, Sichuan Province (now called Kaizhou). He attended the middle and high schools attached to the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in Wuhan, and then graduated from the art academy in 1965. After working as an editor at the Hubei People’s Publishing House throughout the Cultural Revolution, he returned to the art academy and was awarded a master’s degree in Oil Painting in 1981. He served, briefly, as Vice President of the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in 1989 before being stripped of his post: he had supported the student activists in the civil unrest leading up to the occupation of Tiananmen Square. Later, in the 1990s, he taught painting at South China Normal University, before accepting a professorship at Capital Normal University in Beijing, where he then became the Director. Trained in Soviet-style Socialist Realism, Shang Yang soon developed his own, stripped-back technique of painting that incorporated unusual combinations of found materials. Shang’s work has been shown in group exhibitions in China, Europe and the United States with solo exhibitions in Suzhou (2013), Beijing (2012, 2009), Chengdu (2006) and New York (2018). Shang Yang lives and works in Beijing.
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