Although Yang passed away six years ago in 1997, his works can still be seen on permanent display in the Beijing Olympic Sports Center, in front of the Orient Overseas Building in New York City, at the National Concert Hall in Taipei, and at the Kasumigaura Golf Course in Tsukuba, Japan, to name only a few. His sculptural oeuvre displays a profundity and depth that comes from a solid grounding in both Western and Chinese aesthetics. Born in a distinguished family in Ilan, northeastern Taiwan, he was able to enjoy the advantages of a good upbringing and education--through the span of his lifetime, he studied in Beijing, Tokyo, Taiwan, and Italy. But even though he got off to a good start in life and received much accolade and applause during his career, his life was not free of setbacks and painful experiences. It started from a childhood deprived of the company of his parents.

A child who missed his mother

The Yang family, originally from Fujian, mainland China, accumulated wealth by engaging in trading. To take care of their family businesses in Manchuria and Beijing, Yang's parents, Chao-hua and Yuan-yang, stayed for long durations of time in China and only came back to Taiwan every three years. Yang's maternal grandmother insisted on keeping little Yang by her side in order to ensure that his parents would regularly come back to see her. Without his parents around him, little Yang would miss them so much that he often burst into tears.

The boy was always the happiest when his parents came home. He would walk on the streets with his mother, feeling so proud when her beauty made passersby turn their heads. He also enjoyed watching her comb her hair in front of a large mirror framed in redwood engraved with shapes of phoenixes. The happy time was brief, however. When his parents returned to China, he would stare at the empty mirror feeling sad and forlorn. Gradually he came to associate the phoenix carvings on the mirror frame with his mother. The phoenix became a symbol for his much-missed mother and later became a recurrent motif in Yang's sculpture. The moon, another important motif in his work, is also connected with his mother, who would point at it and tell young Yang that when he missed her, he could look up at the sky and talk to the moon and she would be able to hear him in China.

Yang's separation from his parents made him sensitive to the beautiful landscape of Ilan. He sought solace in the enchanting scenery and used paper-cutting and clay molding to recreate things he saw in the natural environment. "Because I pined for the company of my mom so much, I could only give vent to my emotions through those creative activities. But they also helped me develop a keen sense of observation and a rich imagination," the artist reminisced.

When he was 13, he was finally reunited with his parents. He had graduated from primary school by then, and his mother insisted on his going to Beijing to attend junior high school. The boy's grandmother cried for days. In the end, she agreed to let him go on one condition--he had to be engaged to his cousin, Li Ting, and once he finished his schooling he had to return to Ilan to marry her (at that time in Chinese society, arranged marriages were not unusual).

Thus engaged at a young age, Yang left for Beijing in 1939.

Teenage years

In Beijing, Yang attended a Japanese school because he could not speak Mandarin. When he was growing up in Taiwan, the island was under Japanese occupation (1895-1945); thus he could only speak Japanese and the Taiwanese dialect. At the school, he received strict training in drawing, oil painting, and sculpture from his Japanese teachers. His artistic talent gradually showed. One oil painting and two sculptural pieces he created were selected for display at an art exhibition. He was the youngest participant in the exhibition. Because of this honor, young Yang came to a decision: "I want to be a sculptor!"

Originally, Yang's father, Chao-hua, was very proud of his son and invited many relatives and friends to the exhibition to share the honor. But when he learned of his son's ambition to become a sculptor, his attitude took an about-face. Like most traditional fathers, he was afraid that his son would end up starving if he became an artist. He decided to do something to change his son's mind.

In 1943, Chao-hua sent his son, who had not yet graduated from high school, to Tokyo. Entrusting him to a friend there, he arranged for Yang to take the entrance exam to the Architecture Department at Tokyo Art School. Chao-hua had thought it all out beforehand. Architecture was also an art form and was closely related to sculpture. If his son became an architect, his future would surely be much brighter than if he became a sculptor.

Young Yang passed the highly competitive exam with honors and entered the school as his father wished. There he was to meet two teachers who would greatly influence him and shape his artistic career: Yoshida Isoya, a famed architect, and Asakura Fumio, a master sculptor who was honored with the titles of "Rodin of the East" and "the father of modern Japanese sculpture." Yang studied extensively under these two good teachers, through whom he came to learn of the great achievements of ancient Chinese architecture, especially during the period from the Wei Dynasty to the Tang Dynasty (220-907). Ancient Chinese architecture emphasizes the unison of humans and the environment, and buildings were often created to blend with natural surroundings. Yoshida Isoya highly praised the art of Chinese landscape architecture, in which trees, flowers, hills, ponds, springs, pavilions, and buildings were arranged in such a way as to become a most beautiful art design. Listening to the teachers' lectures, Yang learned of the profundity and greatness of Chinese culture. A whole new vista opened up to him, and a foundation was laid for the formation of his "lifescape" artistic concept.

His studies in Japan were unfortunately interrupted by intensive US bombings in 1945. Yang's parents were deeply concerned about his safety. They sent him a telegram telling him to come home immediately.

Back in China, Yang and his father discussed his future. Yang told his father that because of the influence of his teacher Yoshida Isoya, he had changed his mind about purely being a sculptor. He would combine his father's wishes and his own and merge the arts of sculpture and architecture by incorporating sculpture into environmental design and landscape architecture.

Yang soon entered the Art Department at Fu Jen Catholic University in Beijing. During a summer trip, he visited the Yunkang Caves in Shanxi Province. His young mind was immediately enthralled by the more than 51,000 Buddhist statues in a string of 53 caves that stretched over one kilometer. The art in the Yunkang Caves, created during the Northern Wei Dynasty [fifth century], represents the pinnacle of Buddhist religious art. Yang's keen eye perceived how different the Buddhist carvings in the Yunkang Caves were from ancient Greek sculptures. While the West stressed unrestrained energy and realistic portrayal, the East emphasized tranquillity and the capture of essence. Having been a Buddhist since he was a child (both his mother and grandmother were devout Buddhists), Yang was greatly touched by the stateliness and dignified tranquility of the carvings. This unforgettable experience led him to create many Buddhist statues later in life, comprising an important part of his sculptural work. Some critics even praised his Buddhist art as the best of its kind in Taiwan.

Back to Taiwan

When Yang turned 21, his grandmother wrote to his parents to urge him to go back to Taiwan to marry his cousin, Li Ting. Yang returned to his hometown, Ilan, as asked. Although the arranged marriage was not ideal, Yang accepted it without any complaints. Originally, he had planned to go back to Beijing with his wife after the wedding to complete his studies at Fu Jen University. But his father-in-law, Li Jung-chen, fell ill, and then mainland China fell into the hands of the Chinese Communists. Communication between Taiwan and China was cut off (for more than 30 years), making it impossible for Yang to make the trip back to Beijing.

Yang's father-in-law owned a drugstore. His illness made him unable to manage the store, so he asked Yang to take it over. Full of lofty dreams about art, Yang could not bring himself to accept the old man's offer. Thus he turned it down and asked his wife to run the store instead. He soon found Ilan to be spiritually stifling. He wanted to talk about his artistic ideals but no one seemed to be able to understand him. Those around him knew that he was very talented and well-educated and they were full of respect for him. But because of the intellectual gap between them, they barely spoke the same language. He felt completely stranded. After teaching at a local high school for several months, he decided that he had to do something about his future. He left his hometown and went to Taipei.

In order to make a living, Yang worked for one year as a plant illustrator for the Department of Botany at National Taiwan University. Then he learned that the newly established Art Department at Taiwan Normal University was recruiting students. Tuition was free and the school even provided free boarding and meals for its students. He decided to go for it. Having received rigorous training at Tokyo Art School and Fu Jen University, he breezed through the entrance exam and entered the university.

At Taiwan Normal University, Yang no longer felt as confined as he had in Ilan. There were people he could talk to, such as professors and classmates, and he also made friends with many artists, writers, and poets. In addition to illustrating books and magazines published by his writer friends, he also participated in art exhibitions held by the Oriental Painting Group and the May Painting Association, two important art groups that helped launch the island's modern art movement in the 1950s.

Yang soon made a name for himself. At that time, there were two major annual art exhibitions in Taiwan: the Taiwan Provincial Art Exhibition held by the government and the Taiyang Art Exhibition held by local artists. The two exhibitions had three contest categories: oil painting, Chinese painting, and sculpture. Yang submitted works in all three categories and won first prize in all of them! He became famous overnight.

However, through another quirk of fate, Yang had to quit school again in his junior year. His father-in-law passed away. Because the old man had no son to inherit his assets, local custom dictated that his drugstore had to be passed on to his brothers. Without the drugstore, Yang's wife was unable to make money to support the family. Since there was no market for art in Taiwan at that time, Yang had no choice but to drop out of school to find a job.

So far, Yang had attended Tokyo Art School, Fu Jen Catholic University in Beijing, and Taiwan Normal University (later he would also go to the National Academy of Art in Rome), and yet he had never obtained a single diploma. "Fate seems to be playing jokes on me as far as my formal education goes," the artist once lamented.

In 1951, Lan Yin-ting, a painter from Ilan, established the Abundant Harvest magazine, a publication sponsored with US aid. Knowing that Yang was looking for a job, Lan asked him to be the art editor of the magazine. The job not only paid well, but also allowed Yang to make good use of his artistic talent. His wife bore him six children. If it weren't for his job, Yang would have found it difficult to support the big family; he might also have suffered the same fate of artists whose gift and zeal for art ebb away under the pressures of reality. Therefore, he was grateful to Lan throughout his lifetime.

The Abundant Harvest magazine recorded the development of agriculture in Taiwan. Because of his job, Yang was able to visit almost all the rural villages on the island, and he created a large batch of woodblock prints, paintings, and sculptural pieces to note down what he saw and felt. During this period the works he produced, which powerfully portrayed country life and the perseverance and down-to-earth simplicity of farmers, were later named by art critics as his "Nativist Art Series." Painter and art critic Hsieh Li-fa commented that Yang was the only person to flesh out Taiwan's post-war country life through art at that time.

While Yang worked for the magazine, he often visited Wufeng, a town located in central Taiwan, where hundreds of thousands of antiques and art pieces transported from Beijing by the Nationalist Government were temporarily stored before they were placed and displayed in the National Palace Museum. Chuang Yen, the late vice-director of the museum, was making an inventory of all the items and sorting them out. Admiring Yang's talent, Yen made an exception for the young artist and allowed him to examine the precious collections of ceramics, calligraphy, painting, and ritual bronzes in the museum. Like the Yunkang Caves that Yang had visited when he was a student at Fu Jen University, the collections enriched his vision and provided him with important nourishment for art.

Never ceasing to hone his artistic abilities, Yang received recognition in the international art community when he was only 33 years old. His bronze sculpture, "The Philosopher" (based on the image of the Buddha), was showcased in the First International Youth Arts Festival in Paris. Considered one of the best works on exhibit, it drew rave responses from critics. Ranked with other world-renowned top sculptors, Yang was extolled as a master sculptor whose work "pointed out a direction for the future development of sculpture."

Yang decided to quit his job at the Abundant Harvest magazine in 1960 after he was commissioned to create large-scale outdoor bas-reliefs for the Sun Moon Lake Teachers' Hostel in Taichung. After completing the commission, he was no longer able to curb his fervent desire to devote all of his energy to artistic creation. His wife asked him in dismay, "How are we going to live if you quit your job? How can you manage to support our family as a full-time sculptor?" Although Yang also shared his wife's worries, he was firm in his resolve. The creative urge was too strong for him to simply ignore it.

Rome

At about the same time, he was offered a trip to Rome to thank Pope Paul VI for agreeing to have Fu Jen Catholic University relocated from mainland China to Taiwan. Yang longed to go to Rome, the birthplace of Renaissance art, but was too poor to afford the trip. As luck would have it, Yang Shih-sung, a rich merchant from the Philippines, asked Yang to create a bronze statue for his aged father. The millionaire asked the artist how much he would charge for the service. When Yang told him frankly about his wish to go to Rome, he immediately agreed to cover his travelling expenses and his family's living expenses for six months.

With the millionaire's help, Yang happily made the trip to Rome. But Italy's immigration bureau only agreed to issue him a three-month visa. It was impossible for Yang to content himself with a short three-month stay in the "paradise of art." An Italian priest told him that if he wanted to stay, the only way was to register at a school and obtain a student visa.

With the help of an Italian-speaking friend, Yang applied for admission to the Sculpture Department at the National Academy of Art in Rome. Because he did not have a single diploma, he could only show photographs of his previous works to the school. After seeing the photographs, the president of the academy and the director of the sculpture department said, "There is nothing more we can teach you, but we will give you the permission to be a student here. You can decide whether you want to attend classes or not." The 38-year-old Yang thus became a student again.

Yang had brought a lot of woodblock prints, Chinese paintings, and oil paintings he had created in Taiwan to Rome. These works sold well, thus relieving him of his financial difficulties. He traveled around in Italy, painting the beautiful scenery he saw along the way. Through a fortuitous turn of events, he also learned how to mint coins and medallions and acquired the most advanced bronze-casting skills.

He lived in Rome for three years and held many exhibitions in the major cities of Italy, including Legnano, Turin, Rome, Messina, Spa, and Venice. These exhibitions were all highly acclaimed. In 1966, he was even awarded a gold medal for painting and a silver medal for sculpting at the Olimpiade d' Arte Cultura, Abano Terme, Italy.

Lifescape sculptures

During his stay in Italy, Yang saw numerous stone buildings and sculptures. Knowing that Italy was famous for its marble, he often visited local marble factories and trading companies to study the stone. Because of his extensive knowledge in the field, a Taiwanese government official who was visiting Italy invited Yang to be an advisor to a newly established government marble factory in Hualien, eastern Taiwan, upon his return home. Yang agreed to take on the position on condition that instead of a salary, the factory would provide him free marble for the creation of his sculptures.

Yang returned to Taiwan in 1966. With the stone and equipment supplied by the factory, he produced many monumental sculptural pieces. Great not only in size but also in imaginative scope, his sculptures suggested a vast breadth of mind and boldness of spirit. He believed that the best location for a sculpture was a public place. Art shouldn't be something that could only be found in museums and galleries. It should be within reach and closely related to people's lives. He was most famous for creating sculptures that were site-specific, engineered to reflect the environment and landscape. He would consider the location of a sculpture's placement and come up with a design in agreement with the sculpture's surroundings, emphasizing the need for humans to live in harmony with the natural environment. He called these sculptures "lifescapes."

Aside from stone, Yang tried his hand at almost every conceivable medium, including paper, cloth, wood, clay, bronze, iron, and stainless steel. He even experimented with asphalt and laser light. He was an artist often praised for his experimental spirit and his courage to imbue new elements into his work. Of all the artistic mediums, his favorite was stainless steel, which was introduced to Taiwan around 1961. The sculptor was attracted to the bright, clear surface of the material, which reminded him of the shiny smoothness of Chinese porcelain. He liked it especially because of its mirror-like surface, which, by reflecting the surroundings, unites his sculpture with the environment. He was so fond of the material that in the later part of his life he worked with it almost exclusively.

During the latter span of his life, Yang received numerous prestigious commissions for sculptures and environmental designs in Taiwan, Japan, Italy, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Americans first came to know of his talent in 1973, when he created his highly symbolic "East West Gate" for the Orient Overseas Building on Wall Street in New York City. A year later in Spokane, Washington, his "Spring Returns to the Good Earth" appeared at the World's Fair. After that, his fame in the United States as well as in Europe and Asia grew, establishing his position as a preeminent contemporary Chinese sculptor. The Royal Society of British Sculptors even selected Yang as its first International Fellow and invited him to hold a six-month major retrospective at Chelsea Harbor, London, in 1996. He was praised for bringing "immortal pieces of artwork" to London.

Yang's work evolved from traditional expressions to semi-abstract and abstract forms in which he pared away unnecessary detail to reveal essential, profoundly symbolic shapes. His sculptures often converted Chinese symbols such as the dragon and phoenix, sky and earth, and other thematic pairs into fluid abstract forms. He used these symbols to display the interaction of opposites in nature. His refined stainless steel forms, marked by smooth, elegant lines, revealed the discipline and skill of the artist's hand and radiated an ebullient spiritual energy.

A lifetime of ceaseless artistic efforts

Yang passed away in 1997 after a lifetime of incessant devotion to artistic creation. One year before his death, he started to suffer from repeated attacks of fever. Doctors could not find the cause. Yet although he was ill, he still did his best to create whenever his health allowed him. Producing prolifically during his whole lifetime, he left behind an amazing amount of artwork which put an indelible mark on Taiwan's sculptural landscape.

In order to spread Yang's artistic ideas and allow the public to learn more about his art, his children, in conjunction with National Chiao Tung University, set up the Yuyu Yang Art Research Center in 2000. The center is devoted to organizing and storing all the documents about Yang's art and conducting related research. "Our father doesn't belong only to us, his family members," said his third daughter, Master Kuan Chien, a Buddhist nun. "He belongs to everyone. His works and his philosophy of art are an important cultural asset of our society."

People who want to get a glimpse of the sculptor's talent can go to downtown Taipei and visit the Yuyu Yang Lifescape Sculpture Museum, which was established by the sculptor himself in 1992. There, works ranging from traditional Buddhist statues to refined woodcuts of water buffaloes to abstract stainless steel sculptures are displayed, illustrating the preeminent sculptor's great gift and skill. Visitors will not only gain a preliminary understanding of his talent, but will also enjoy a gratifying and inspiring visual experience at the same time.