b.1975 in China
Born in China, Jun Yang came to Vienna with his family at the age of four. Yang often tells stories in his works that stem from his personal history and focus on questions of cultural and national identity, in particular what it means to grow up in-between different cultures without retorting to identity politics. In A Better Tomorrow, a video produced for the Liverpool Biennial in 2006, he created striking images of contemporary Liverpool that included: a derelict building that had been wrapped up, the progressive decrease in the city’s population over the past half century, and countless refurbished high-rise apartment blocks serving to generate the vision of a new urban living environment for the inhabitants of the city. Working in first-person narrative, he led viewers into these city spaces, wandering between gradually collapsing old houses and imagined dwellings of the future. In his recent works Yang has been exploring and extending his ideas in public situations. In the 2008 CIGE Art Fair, Beijing, with Vitamin Creative Space, the artist initiated a public space to be used in the art fair. He has questioned museum structures such as that in the HeiDi museum shop for the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig where he shifted the traditional museum shop trade and turned it into one where visitors could buy a beer, a sausage, or a Guarana Power softdrink of Superflex. Yang's participation in recent group exhibitions include the 51st Venice Biennial, 2005; Liverpool Biennial 2006 and 'Cross-border'at theKunstmuseum Stuttgart, 2007.