Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs! Stop for a moment your frantic quest for the next conceptual prodigy, put away your phones and your overpriced exhibition catalogs, and look, really look, at what happens when Fan Yang dips his brush in the ink. While you are amazed by meaningless installations at the Art Paris fair, this man transmutes the millennial Chinese tradition into something electrifying, visceral, that shakes our Western certainties about what ink painting can be today.
Fan Yang is not just another Chinese painter. He is that glorious anomaly that emerges when an artist masters his tradition so deeply that he can transcend it without ever betraying it. Born in Hong Kong in 1955, raised in Jiangsu, imbued with classical teachings, Fan Yang could have comfortably settled into the reproduction of ancestral models. Instead, he transformed this base into something surprisingly contemporary, creating works that resonate with both history and our tumultuous era.
What strikes me in his landscapes is this almost Nietzschean vision of the sublime and the terrible. Nietzsche, the philosopher who dared to look at the abyss until the abyss looked back at him, shares with Fan Yang this ability to embrace chaos to extract an aesthetic truth [1]. In his landscapes with deeply saturated colors, particularly his series on Southern Anhui, Fan Yang does not seek the servile reproduction of nature but rather the expression of a deeper, wilder truth. There is something in his way of approaching mountains and watercourses that evokes the Nietzschean will to power, not as domination, but as an intense affirmation of life, despite (or perhaps because of) its chaotic and unpredictable nature.
Look at his series “A corner of Southern Anhui” with its tormented ink lines, these strokes that entangle like contradictory thoughts. Do you not see this “amor fati”, this love of destiny that Nietzsche preached? Fan Yang does not paint idealized mountains, he paints mountains that have lived, that have suffered, that bear the scars of time but still stand, majestic and untamed.
This ambivalence between order and chaos, between technical mastery and expressive abandon, constitutes the very essence of Fan Yang’s artistic approach. It is not simply a style, but a philosophy translated into ink strokes. The way he loads his brushes with dense ink to create these black masses that seem both threatening and protective recalls this Nietzschean notion that beauty is not in sterile perfection, but in the acceptance of dissonance and contradiction.
“Man must have chaos within him to give birth to a dancing star”, wrote Nietzsche in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” [2]. Fan Yang’s works are precisely these dancing stars, born of mastered chaos, of the constant tension between structure and freedom.
But Fan Yang is not just an unconscious disciple of Western philosophical principles. He inscribes himself in a Chinese tradition that he boldly reinterprets. His technique of “thick brush and deep ink” (bi hou mo chen) recalls that of master Huang Binhong, but he injects into it an almost violent energy that transforms this technique into something deeply personal.
The Chinese art critic Fan Di’an rightly observes that Fan Yang’s approach to landscape “has developed a substantial aesthetic of brush and ink and a grand artistic vision adapted to the contemporary era” [3]. It is no coincidence that his works have found their place in the permanent collections of the National Art Museum of China; they represent this essential dialogue between tradition and innovation that characterizes the best moments of contemporary Chinese art.
But let us now speak of this other interesting facet of Fan Yang’s work, which connects him so powerfully to our media age and evokes Marshall McLuhan’s theories on media as extensions of man. For several years, Fan Yang has embarked on an ambitious project he calls “Drawings of the Current World” or “Shishi hui”, in which he translates current events into traditional Chinese painting, thus creating a visual chronicle of our time.
McLuhan, this visionary media theorist, had predicted that “the medium is the message” [4], meaning that the very form of a medium incorporates itself into the message, creating a symbiotic relationship where the medium influences how the message is perceived. Fan Yang, by choosing to represent contemporary events, whether the Olympic Games or global political news, through the prism of traditional Chinese painting, operates precisely this type of media transformation that McLuhan spoke of.
There is something profoundly subversive in this approach. Fan Yang takes an art often considered frozen in tradition and transforms it into a tool for analyzing the present. In doing so, he demystifies both traditional Chinese painting (by showing its continued relevance) and contemporary media (by offering an alternative to their often superficial immediacy).
His paintings of Olympic athletes are particularly revealing of this approach. By applying the ancestral principles of Chinese painting, the importance of the stroke, the capture of the essence rather than the appearance, the balance between emptiness and fullness, to subjects such as modern swimmers or runners, Fan Yang creates a striking temporal bridge. Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, was sufficiently impressed to invite Fan Yang to exhibit his works at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne in 2017, making him the first Chinese painter to organize a solo exhibition on the theme of sport [5].
McLuhan would undoubtedly have been fascinated by this reinterpretation of the sports message through the ancestral medium of ink on paper. “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us”, he wrote [6]. Fan Yang, by choosing to shape his contemporary images with the tools of tradition, invites us to reconsider not only Chinese art but also our relationship to the events represented.
Take his representations of the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games. Where Western media offered spectacular but often contextually shallow images, Fan Yang created works that inscribe these moments in the continuity of Chinese history, linking the contemporary spectacle to millennial traditions. It is precisely this type of cultural mediation that McLuhan considered essential to intercultural understanding.
But make no mistake: Fan Yang is not a mere illustrator of events. His work on Olympic sport transcends the anecdotal to reach an almost mythological dimension. His athletes are not simply bodies in motion but incarnations of the Olympic ideal of self-transcendence, rendered with an intensity that recalls the energy of warriors in traditional Chinese paintings.
This ability to transcend the immediate subject to touch the universal is characteristic of great artists. Fan Yang does not simply show us athletes in action; he reveals the continuity of human experience through the ages, the timelessness of the quest for excellence and transcendence.
It is interesting to note how Fan Yang manages to maintain this productive tension between tradition and innovation, between history and current events. His painting technique, with its expressive lines and masses of ink that are both delicate and imposing, is never a mere exercise in style. It is the necessary vehicle of a worldview that refuses easy dichotomies between East and West, between past and present.
The painter himself has a clear awareness of his pivotal position. “It takes the greatest mastery to enter into tradition, and the greatest courage to emerge from it”, he declared [7]. This phrase could almost serve as a manifesto for his artistic approach.
Fan Yang learned from the masters, he studied the ancestral techniques, he practiced tirelessly. But he never became a slave to this tradition. On the contrary, he internalized it to the point of being able to transcend it, creating works that respect the heritage while pushing it towards new horizons.
This dialectic between respect and transcendence is particularly visible in his series of “Red Arhats”, a name given in Buddhism to one who has reached the last stage of wisdom and enlightenment. Fan Yang takes up a traditional theme of Buddhist painting, but infuses it with a striking contemporary energy. His arhats are not hieratic figures frozen in a pose of serene wisdom; they are living beings, vibrant with energy, whose red robes seem almost in motion on the surface of the paper.
Fan Yang thus achieves this tour de force: he uses the visual vocabulary of tradition to express a resolutely contemporary sensibility. It is not a break with the past, but a continuous conversation, a dialogue between the generations of artists who have shaped the Chinese tradition.
This approach is not without controversy. Some critics like Qiao Wei have judged his style “twisted and impatient”, accusing him of straying from traditional aesthetic values [8]. But it is precisely this tension, this friction with conventional expectations that makes Fan Yang a significant artist for our time.
We live in a world where cultural, national, aesthetic borders are constantly being challenged. Fan Yang’s work, with its bold syntheses between tradition and innovation, between Western philosophy and Eastern sensibility, between ancient media and contemporary subjects, offers us a possible model for navigating this complexity.
I will conclude with a personal observation. As art critics, we are often too quick to categorize, to label, to pigeonhole artists into comfortable boxes. Fan Yang obstinately resists this temptation. He is both deeply Chinese in his technique and universal in his vision, traditionalist in his means and innovative in his ends, rigorous in his mastery and free in his expression.
This productive ambivalence, this ability to simultaneously inhabit different conceptual spaces, makes him a particularly relevant artist for our time of transitions and transformations. As we all seek to navigate a world where certainties are crumbling, where traditions are being questioned and where the future seems increasingly uncertain, Fan Yang’s art offers us a precious perspective: that of a man who has found his unique voice precisely by embracing complexity, contradiction, and change.
With his visceral landscapes, his expressive portraits, and his visual chronicle of our time, Fan Yang is not just a great Chinese painter, he is an essential witness to our shared humanity, translating into ink strokes and color stains the complex and often contradictory experience of living astride traditions and modernity, East and West, local and global.
So, yes, you bunch of snobs, stop looking for the next ephemeral phenomenon and take the time to immerse yourself in Fan Yang’s work. You will not find easy answers, but something much more precious: an art that asks the right questions, that challenges us to rethink our certainties and that, in the process, offers us a wild, vibrant, undeniable beauty.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Beyond Good and Evil”, 1886, translated by Patrick Wotling, GF-Flammarion, 2000.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, 1883-1885, translated by Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, Les Classiques de Poche, 1972.
- Fan Di’an, cited in “Chinese painter Fan Yang, a chronicler of the times”, CGTN, March 30, 2023.
- McLuhan, Marshall. “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”, 1964, translated by Jean Paré, Seuil, 1968.
- “Strength and Beauty, Works of Fan Yang”, exhibition at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, May 2017.
- McLuhan, Marshall. “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”, MIT Press, 1994.
- Fan Yang, interview in “Fan Yang: I should be the best painter”, New Express News, June 18, 2017.
- Qiao Wei, “The distortion and impatience of Fan Yang’s brush and ink”, Shuhua Magazine, July 9, 2018.
