YANG YANPING (b.1934) Autumn Song, 1996YANG YANPING (b.1934)Autumn Song, 1996Ink and colour on xuan paper, framed. 66.7cm long x 133.4cm wide (26 1/4in long x 52 1/2in wide).楊燕屏（1934年生） 秋歌 紙本設色 鏡框 1996作 Published, Illustrated and Exhibited: Chinese Ink Painting Now, New York, 2010, p.199.Michael Goedhuis, The Ink Art of China, London, 2019, pp.20-21. 展覽著錄：《當代中國水墨畫》，紐約，2010年，第199頁Michael Goedhuis著，《水墨中国》，伦敦，2019年，第20-21頁Yang Yanping is famous for her paintings of Autumn and lotus; with impressive compositions of saturated reds, golds and ink on paper, her works strays close to pure abstraction. She studied architecture at Tsinghua University, where she married one of her painting teachers, Zeng Shanqing. After she graduated in 1958, and a brief spell of teaching factory design, Yang decided to study art at the Oil Painting Department of the Beijing Art Academy. At the same time she studied traditional Chinese painting on her own. In 1986, both Yang and her husband were awarded fellowships from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and they have remained in America ever since.Yang is well versed in many traditional styles but has excelled in depicting the lotus flower, a symbol of purity, transience, the fragility of nature, and the potential for regeneration. Yang's ideals of high visual quality and an artistic autonomy allows her to embrace modernism without jettisoning the lessons from the classical Chinese world of high culture. Her recent exhibitions include a major retrospective at The Art Museum of Beijing Fine Art Academy in 2013. Yang Yanping's work can be found in many prestigious institutions globally, including the Art Institute of Chicago which has recently held a major exhibition of her work, see Expressive Ink: Paintings by Yang Yanping and Zeng Shanqing, Chicago, 2019; The Art Museum of Beijing Fine Art Academy, Beijing; The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; The Albertina, Vienna; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; The British Museum, London; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.For a related painting by Yang Yanping, 'Deep Autumn', 2004, see China Onward: The Estella Collection, Chinese Contemporary Art, 1966-2006, Humlebaek, 2007, pp.360-361.