Yang Dongxue

杨冬雪

b.1984

Constellation catalog

Yang Dongxue was born in 1984 in Shenyang, Liaoning Province. He studied in the sculpture department of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, and at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He currently resides and works in Beijing. 

Early on his career Yang was a member of a heavy-metal rock band, and his first exhibited works combined sound with drawings. He sees himself as a ‘dedicated’ and ‘serious’ artist but seems aware of the perpetual struggle to express oneself honestly. He aims to shift the focus away from the outcome and onto the process of creation. For him, the nub of the work is the interplay between the conscious and subconscious acts of conceiving art. 

His practice is marked by a deep ambivalence towards art production, and towards his own role as a player in the contemporary art scene. In his 2013 solo exhibition Got Used to Consume Today’s Achievement with Achievement Habitually (Club Arts Center, Beijing), the work consisted of a text made of wooden letters painted red, yellow and green that read: WE NEVER LOVED ART AND ART NEVER LOVED US. In Regarding the Silent Majority at Peking Fine Arts, Hong Kong (2014), Yang talked about ‘the realities we cannot or do not want to change’ with a series of baffling and disturbing watercolours that he appeared unwilling to comment up on or explain. He has participated in several group exhibitions, among them New Paper, Pékin Fine Arts Gallery, Beijing in 2013; and Keep the Modern Going: Immersion, Waiting and Idealism, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen in 2014.