On the occasion of YANG Jiechang’s 60th birthday, a solo exhibition entitled On Earth as in Heaven takes place at the gallery presenting around 20 works by the artist, from different creative periods, as dense in content as they are in expression.

Yang Jiechang was born in 1956 in Foshan in southern China where he lived until 1978. He was deeply affected by the Cultural Revolution proclaimed by Mao Zedong in 1966. After brifly joining the red guards in the 1970s, he quickly distanced himself studying calligraphy and deciding to study Chinese art history theory at the Canton Fine Arts Academy where he was also trained in the traditional art of ink painting. Gaining a considerable mastery of calligraphy and acute knowledge of traditional Chinese thinking, Yang Jiechang decided to be initiated over a period of several years into Taoism and Zen Buddhism which proved vital for the development of his formal language reduced to the essential. He emerged from this period firmly convinced that “traditional expression” in no way depends on a fixed form but resides in daily actions that evolve ad infinitum. “The real has no form” seems to be a leitmotiv for a body of work that has been developing for more than thirty years.