Yang Shaobin is a contemporary Chinese painter known for his portraits of deformed ghoulish figures that comment on the social and political changes in his country. Born in 1963 in Tangshan, China, he studied at the Hebei Polytechnical University before moving to Yuanmingyuan, a village on the outskirts of Beijing. Yang’s work of the early 1990s focused primarily on groups of men in uniform fighting one another, but by the end of the decade his paintings had taken on looser brushstrokes and more surreal imagery. In his recent series X-Blind Spot (2004), Yang examined the living conditions of coal mining communities in around China through both painting and sculpture. The artist currently lives and works in Beijing, China...