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Yang Longhai (杨龙海) was born in Guiyang, China in 1978 and graduated from the Guizhou Institute of the Arts in 2000. In the beginning of 2006 he founded the Chinese Contemporary Art Files Project (CCAFP) and since then has been collaborating on the organization of 21 contemporary art exhibitions for island6 Arts Center. In 2007, he started to assist the French artist/curator Thomas Charvériat in the creation of the island6Lab (Liu Dao 六岛), an electronic and interactive Chinese art group that provides state-of-the-art tools for digital research and experimentation.
Yang Longhai participated in "Remote/Control", an interactive multimedia art exhibition held at MOCA Shanghai, and in the notorious French festival "Nuit Blanche" for its first Asian edition. In February 2008, he was one of the artists chosen by Manaart and island6 to be represented during the first edition of the Roma Contemporary Art Fair.
Due to the original nature of his work, Yang Longhai has been given many names. Art collector Chris Moore calls him the "Electronista" (English PDF / Chinese PDF), art critic Rajath Suri describes him as an "inventive spirit" (English PDF / Chinese PDF), whereas art critic Rebecca Catching refers to him as a "digital crusader".
To create his electronic art, Yang shoots a video, then feeds it through an LED controller, which converts the high-resolution, multicolored images into red, green or orange light. The use of sand, rice and paper over the screens helps reduce the glare of the lights. "Rice and ink are both important parts of Chinese contemporary culture, and they give some human elements to this very cold medium," says artist Zou Susu, referring to Yang's work.
(Shanghai Urbanatomy – That’s Shanghai, March 2008. Digital Crusaders by Rebecca Catching).
The artist has work in private and public collections throughout Europe, North America, Asia and Oceania.
Yang Longhai is one of te main pillar of the art collective Liu Dao 六岛.
Yang Longhai participated in the following exhibitions: "The Artist Died Yesterday", "Automata", “Urban Lust”, “Clouds of Crowds", "Zero Gravity", "PlugIt", "Made in Shanghai", "Made in China", "Nuit Blanche", "Eurasia One", "Platform for Urban Investigation II", "Remote/Contol", "Bits, Bytes and Pixels", "Untitled Santa", "I Love LEDs" and "Getting Along" |