Yan Cong

Yan Cong's artistic career began in boredom and loneliness, as a student wasting away in his dorm room. He surmounted these by drawing comics and illustrations and posting them online for a growing group of virtual friends. The imaginary landscapes he retreats into and characters that inhabit them blend his psychology and quaint nostalgia for childhood, with a longing for a humble home in the countryside. His adopted penname, yancong, is Chinese for "chimney."

Yan Cong prefers an eclectic mix of elementary materials: ballpoint pen, newspaper collage, low- tech digital illustration, even needle and thread. His choice of mediums reflects the low-tech modesty and longing for an uncomplicated world that color his personal world. Through drawings and comics on paper of various sizes and quality, he invokes a lonely world of folkloric creatures, whose dreamlike adventures unfold in a narrative voice culled over a lifetime of avid comic reading. Much of the detail, the compositional language and depth in his two-dimensional works was informed by his training as a traditional painter of landscapes, although, this formal instruction is otherwise invisible. He shares new comics and illustrations online at his blog, "Soda Pop Stand", and is a central member of the Green School Design Collective, organizing shows and greatly influencing the group aesthetic with his seemingly benign style.

Many of his drawings resemble children' s book illustrations, but their tiny nuances betray the skill of their author, in the form of eyelashes, the twinkle in an eye, or the just-so buttons on a flowery dress. The evil characters have bullhorns, and good boys have rosy cheeks, pig-headed or dog-faced children are everywhere, they might tear out their heart (literally) for us, and the moon smiles down on it all. Although his works might be small, his repertoire is ample–and growing –– each artwork becomes a frame onto Yan Cong's private mythology. As it once did for him, Yan Cong's work shelters us in a simpler world.