Considered one of the most extreme performance artists in China, and perhaps globally, Yang Zhichao uses his body as a tool to draw on social issues linking the individual with the world.
Yang Zhichao was born in Gansu Province in China and currently 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 to 1999. 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.