Huang Yan's work makes reference to a Chinese cultural heritage that is innate to every Chinese person. Yet the artist breaks this heritage at the same time as giving it a new direction, by transposing it onto the human body, the human body that was very rarely used in the ancient culture of painting, but that has played a very important role in the development of contemporary art in China since the end of the 1970s.
Huang Yan feels that an artist should explore the link between tradition and contemporary society, and that contemporary art should express this relationship.