July 3rd, 2020
Huang Yan, Chinese Landscape Tattoo No. 2 中国山水纹身之二. 1999
Chromogenic print
20 × 24”
The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art
With works rife with references to Chinese history and cultural traditions, Huang Yan honours the values of his country’s past while exploring their place within contemporary China. Among his best-known projects is Yan’s “Chinese Landscapes” photographic series, which he begun in 1999. Combining photography, painting, and body art, it features color photographs of himself and others covered with landscape paintings executed in the traditional style. Transposing these paintings onto the nude body was a taboo subject not incorporated into Chinese art until the 1970s. For Huang it illustrates an urgent message. In all of his work, he aims to remind his fellow citizens of the preciousness of China’s artistic, philosophical, and social heritage.
Huang covered his torso with traditional landscape scenes, presenting his “reincarnation” of literati-style painting. The composition, modeled in ink and colours on a white ground by his wife, Zhang Tiemei, follows the natural form of his body. In the photos, the artist’s face is cropped away. Huang’s anonymous torso becomes an emblem of the Chinese everyman who cannot be separated from his cultural heritage, which, like his racial identity, is as permanent as a tattoo.
Image
1 Tattoo No.2
2 Tattoo No. 4
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