Huang Yulong is a Beijing-based artist born in 1983 in Anhui Province, China. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute in Jiangsu Province in 2007. Huang’s sculptures of traditional ceramic porcelain and bronze are strongly influenced by the phenomenon of foreign street culture in China. Best known for his use of hip-hop imagery such as hoodies and Chinese imagery such as Buddhas, his work displays a convergence of Western and Eastern styles, an urban aesthetic with classical underpinning.

The mash-ups of imagery and materiality challenge our expectations of serenity and the contemporary to reflect China’s rapid transition from tradition to the international. The Maitreya image appears in quite a number of Yulong’s works because it is a kind of superficial daily routine to his eyes when he studied in Jingdezhen. Ealing deliberately took out the faces of the characters of his works, essentially removing the most intuitive organ for emotional expression with the objective of enhancing his artistic conception of “null”. With regard to the works of “Miroku” series, they intend to integrate traditional and contemporary symbolism and engage in the different cultural correlation between the East and the West. It seeks to capture the very momentum of the personal mood into a direct expression in artistic form, coupled with the string of changes, reflection and re-creation of the mentality.