SHANG Yang (b.1942, Sichuan, China) is a contemporary Chinese painter based in Beijing and is considered one of the most important painters of the life-stream movement. Being heavily influenced at his early age by the Soviet Union socialist realism, Shang Yang’s work Boatmen on the Yellow River won universal acclaim from the official art establishment. However, he quickly abandoned the Soviet oil painting he learned at the academy and turned to mixed media. Two major series, the Great Landscapes and the Dong Qichang Project, simultaneously reveal his veneration for the tradition of Chinese landscape painting and his despair at the state of the environment in the twenty-first century. According to the artist: “For years I have been using ‘grand landscapes’ to express my concern about the relationship between humans and our environment and about our future survival as a species… the different expressive styles of the artists of the middle ages [agree] on this single subject—nature at one with humans. Now they no longer exist and have been replaced by a fake nature.” (Shang Yang’s Views on Art). Shang Yang’s works since 2016 are his most abstract to date, including the current two series: Decayed Books and Cataract. His work has been widely exhibited nationally (in China) and internally at galleries in London, Paris, Tokyo, St. Petersburg, and Helsinki since the 1980s, including solo exhibitions at Xu Way, Shanghai in 2020, Chambers Fine Art, New York, 2018, and Suzhou Museum in 2013. His work was also featured at the 57th International Art Exhibition La Biennale Di Veneza – Official Parallel Exhibition of China in 2017, the Shanghai Biennale in 1996.