Born: Jilin, Jilin province, 1966. Lives and works in Beijing.

Huang Yan has spent much of his career testing the limits of Chinese landscape painting. Instead of paper scrolls, he paints on everything from human bodies to furniture, musical instruments—even a leg of ham. It’s his classically trained wife, Zhang Tiemei, who executes the paintings; Huang Yan, a sometime poet, comes up with the concepts and photographs the results. Each new substrate gives its own twist to the landscape upon it—a literal one when a face, arm or leg moves. The use of the body is a reminder that China’s artistic heritage is a part of every Chinese person (“to paint a landscape is to paint man”, Huang Yan says), and that that same heritage has mostly shunned the body. If the landscape tradition has settled into cliché, Huang Yan’s unconventional take on it shakes up glib expectations. It also unsettles the eye, pushing it from painting to thing-painted-upon and back. In the Sofa: Painted-Face Landscape series (2006), the subject might equally be the landscape, the sofa, or the face peering out from both. For Huang Yan, landscape painting is not only “the most authentic representation of the philosophy of the ancient Chinese sages”; it’s a personal refuge and a vehicle for rebellion, “my resistance against worldly conflicts and a place to express my Ch’an [Zen] ideas.”