Yan Cong, was born in 1983 in Hubei, China, and now lives and works in Beijing. He became a contracted artist of Star Gallery when he studied in university. Various forms and mediums are adopted by Yan Cong including comics, easel painting, collage and sewing. He is considered as one of the representatives of the "plain style", which is emergency style in contemporary art recently that pursues original, naive, simple and primitive vitality.
Yan Cong produced more works by constinousely exploring possibilties of vairous mediums and methods. Employing brushes to paint comics and palette knife to apply acrylic; from paper cuttings collage and sewing to comics again, he is keeping justfying himself to explore and enjoy a sense of loss of control,try to avoid inertia to produce "old" things.
Yan Cong often takes himself as the protagonist of his works and combine real life with fictional fantasy, weakening the sense of reality and restoring imaginations and meanings of graphic cartoons. He also loves recording sourroundings such as his partner Shang Shang, cats and boss in his cartoons. He has worked on easel paintings such as "Forest" series, "I and Shang Shang" series, and "I and Cat" series. Yan Cong depicts life in his eyes through various forms.
Yan Cong is committed to strengthen the relationship between comics and contemporary art. He hopes to subvert the audiences’ understandings of comics through the combination of comics and easel painting. "I just want them to know that comics can't be absent from the community of contemporary art, because I always think that comics are a part of contemporary art, even though everyone's watching habits have not changed."