CHINESE PAINTING - WOMAN

Yang Zhengxin 

Born in 1942 in Shanghai. In 1958 he became a personal disciple of Jiang Hanting. He graduated from the painting class of the secondary school division of the Shanghai College of Fine Arts in 1961, and from the college's Department of Chinese Painting in 1965. That same year he joined the Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy to work on the creation and study of Chinese painting, as one of the first painters trained by the Academy. Early in his career he immersed himself in the study of tradition. In the 1980s and 1990s he lived abroad, drawing widely on Western modern art and dedicating himself to fusing Chinese and Western art and to modernising the language of ink painting. He developed a bold, spontaneous style of freehand painting (da xieyi) built on calligraphic line. Together with Chen Jialing and Zhang Guiming, he is known as one of the "Three Musketeers" of New Shanghai School painting.