Very few artists, in expressing the encounter between Chinese traditional culture and the contemporary world, have succeeded in simultaneously capturing the fusion and the paradox that this encounter generates. Huang Yan's work makes reference to landscape paintings- a Chinese cultural heritage that is innate to every Chinese person- yet the artist breaks this heritage as giving it a new direction, by transposing it onto the human body.
The skin becomes a piece of paper as Huang Yan paints his subject, leading us to question whether the subject of his work is the body or the painting? Is it a painted body, or a landscape? Is it a face, or the branch of a plum tree? As the body moves, the painted subject takes another shape or meaning. As the forearm folds across the chest, the branch of a willow tree moves into the landscape's foreground. The face just has to open or close his eyes for us to be absorbed by the landscape, or on the contrary, by the human aspect of the subject. Huang Yan then multiplies the possibilities of the landscape transposition by painting onto the bones of a skeleton or on a leg of ham, again making reference to flesh and the body. Then, he throws himself into creating scenes, where the landscape tattooed body becomes part of a backdrop worthy of a theatre or photography studio.