Yao Yuan is Director of the Landscape Painting Institute under the Nanjing Painting and Calligraphy Academy, reflecting her commitment to art for ecology, as well as Founding President of the Nanjing Kai-Ming Painting and Calligraphy Academy.

Asan acknowledged expert, she is also a member of the Committee of Traditional Bird and Flower Painting of Jiangsu Artists Association. She has been featured by multiple art galleries and exhibitions at the regional and national levels in China. In 2017, her works were included at the Influence: Women in Art Exhibition at NYC Grand Central Terminal, and she gave a lecture on Chinese traditional ink painting at the UN Headquarters New York.

“Of course, I dearly love this city. My generation has witnessed an enormous leap in material conditions which has rendered our days unrecognisable from previous times. Now, true happiness can be found in the everyday, the mundane. 

For the artists and writers of Nanjing, it is easy to become wrapped up in the concept of Jiangnan – in the melancholy and introspection that this cultural identity, of a region in the lower reaches of the Yangtze, evokes. It is a ready canvas on which to paint the abstract landscapes of our inner worlds. 

For this series [the artwork created as part of Real Contentment], I visited the small promontory of Swallow Rock, by which I stood in the evening light, taking in the simple pagoda and thinking to myself that it was not as pleasing a view as the cherry blossom along the riverbank. That sea of flowers is at least joyful and full of life. We took a river cruise to see the buildings along the shore and the ecology of the island in the river’s centre. We passed back and forth under the Yangtze River Bridge. I could tell that the water had become much clearer. It was a yellow-green now, and more transparent – the visible result of recent ecological conservation and restoration efforts. As the population of a riverside city, we reap certain health benefits. But as an artist, I remain committed to visual aesthetics and spiritual perception.

The British artists’ visit coincided with spring in Nanjing, after a sudden jump in temperature had caused all the flowers, whether seasonally or prematurely, to bloom at once. Long stretches of peach and cherry blossoms lined the riverbanks. Set off by the rippling light on the water, a single branch of peach blossom can provide a perfect image of springtime in Jiangnan. I prefer depicting unpeopled scenes like this. It chimes with the emphasis in traditional Chinese painting on creating poetic ambiance and expressing a transcendent inner spirit. By imbuing a scene that includes no actual people with a human presence, we can more powerfully evoke thoughts about humanity – in this liminal space between ancient landscape and genuine inner intention.”