BAZAAR Art | Yang Ming: July, 2026

Yang Ming earned his MFA in painting from the China Academy of Art and is currently pursuing his PhD, lives and works in Hangzhou. He's been showing at major art fairs in recent years, but what really shifted his understanding of what it means to be an "artist" didn't come from the academic institution or the exhibition ecology—it came from the real-world relationships that unfolded through the act of making work itself. In his view, making art starts with accepting your own desires: "It's about accepting your desires."

Yang Ming believes everyone carries an impulse to express and create, "a desire to leave something to the world." So making art isn't really a career choice—it's closer to a continuous way of being.

"I used to think it was enough to just paint well, until I realized that’s not the case." Once a work leaves the studio, it enters a complex web woven together by viewers, collectors, curators, and urban experience—its meaning gets rewritten again and again. So making art is no longer about providing answers; it's about calibrating your distance from the times by constantly generating questions.

No One Has Reached West Lake spanned from 2022 to 2026, four years in total. The initial trigger was a question that had been hanging over him for a long time: Are we seeing West Lake itself, or the repeatedly reconstructed West Lake? He remembers taking the 504 bus from Zhuantang toward Nanshan, with Chinese parasol trees, weeping willows, the lake, and lakeside crowds passing by the window, but the feeling of arriving at West Lake for the first time can never be recovered—only fragments flashing back in memory. 

"People keep getting closer, yet they never seem to truly arrive."

Art on the Edge of Disaster

Yang Ming's canvases are intensely colored, with imagery that sits somewhere between reality and fiction. He mentions an interest in Cézanne, Bacon, and Neo Rauch, but what draws him to them is less their style than their way of working through structural relationships, generative processes, and uncertainty—an approach to painting that relies on feeling rather than planning.

At the same time, his visual vocabulary is deeply rooted in the internet—most of his images come from phone screens, social media, video stills, and game graphics. These two sources aren't in opposition; they overlap and seep into each other on the canvas.

"Our bodies haven't disappeared; we're just relating to the world more and more through images." He calls this state "in-betweenness": neither fully belonging to the body nor fully to the image, but continuously drifting and switching between the two.

His creative process works the same way. Yang Ming doesn't pre-set structures or lock down the boundary between figuration and abstraction; the image generates itself naturally through the interplay of form and color, with figures surfacing and then fading away. "Often the painting raises its own questions—a single brushstroke, a patch of color can set off seeing and thinking." New marks and new perspective keep alternating, settling into something like "the fullness of sensation."

Yang Ming borrows Bacon's phrase to describe this state: "Painting is the art of working on the edge of disaster." Because the crucial moments usually happen between control and losing it.

When it comes to where Chinese contemporary painting sits in an international context, he doesn't stick to the "traditional vs. contemporary" framework. "Globalization is making visual experiences converge; real dialogue isn't about imitation, it's about turning concrete experience into resonating questions." To him, what matters more than "internationalization" is avoiding being turned into a symbol—when artists start catering to other people's fantasy of "Chineseness," they end up losing it.

No Place Left to Retreat

No One Has Reached West Lake isn't a painting; it's an installation-painting—410 × 350 × 320 cm, a group of figurative installations hovering between abstraction and figuration, made of plywood, acrylic, and oil paint.

They look like cut-out silhouettes, part body and part landscape, juxtaposed in space as an anonymous collective. Embedded in the floor is a wooden form taken from the outline of West Lake's surface—as a landscape symbol that's been viewed and reproduced countless times, "West Lake" here is stripped down to a flat spatial afterimage: recognizable, but no longer enterable.

This piece made Yang Ming realize the fundamental difference between painting and installation. "On canvas, space is looked at; in installation, space becomes part of the work." When facing a painting, he can step back to look and feel; but while creating this work, there was no room to step back—sometimes he even had to enter it. "I needed to look by turning around, to feel by walking through it, switching back and forth between painting and installing, focusing my awareness more on peripheral vision or the overall mental image."

This "fluid way of seeing" was enlightening. But Yang Ming also says painting will remain at the core of his practice going forward. "That spark-like flash of feeling and intention in painting is revelatory—it gives you this sense of satisfaction when mind and intent align. That feeling can transcend the bounds of the mediums."

AI Has Never Felt the Wind Of West Lake

In an age of image overload and AI generation, what exactly is the "irreplaceable" thing in painting?

"What's irreplaceable in painting today is the 'wonder' of being human, the revelation of taste, the invitation into a lived experience," he says. "People can paint in an 'anti-painting' way, but AI operates on models and databases. Whether at the visual level or the conceptual level, it can't replace our perception of the world."

Then Yang Ming added: "AI has never felt the wind of West Lake."

From The Call Unanswered (2024) to No One Has Ever Reached West Lake (2026), Yang Ming has been depicting a suspended state "beyond arrival." "Not being able to arrive" isn’t a pessimism or failure, he says—it's a contemporary experience: "We have unprecedented connectivity, yet it's harder than ever to truly get close to each other; we have countless images, yet it's harder than ever to experience something; we have navigation, yet we neither know the way nor know which direction we're going."

When asked whether he's gotten any closer to what he wants to reach over these years, he didn't answer directly. Instead, he talked about stones: "Can we ever know the essence of a stone? The stones in West Lake, the stones by the roadside, the stones in a painting—they're all there, but every time you look, they seem to be different stones. We can describe their shape, texture, and state, yet we can never exhaust them. Stones are mysterious. So is the world."

In his view, the value of art may not lie in providing answers, but in those beautiful "misunderstandings."