About the Artist

Yang Jianhou (1910–1993), formerly Zan Nan and Bai Lang, courtesy name He Ye Cun Ren, was a painter and art educator of the twentieth century. Born in Wuxi, Jiangsu, he studied under Xu Beihong at Central University and later taught at Nanjing University and Nanjing Normal College. He worked across Chinese painting, oil, and drawing, combining Chinese and Western strengths, and held that art is the unity of thought, life, and technique.

Like his teacher Xu Beihong, he excelled in landscape, flower-and-bird, and figure painting, with particular skill in plum, bamboo, cypress, and pine. Notable works include Teacher’s Home Visit, shown at the National Art Exhibition in 1954, and Liberation of Nanjing (1957), collected by the Military Museum of the Chinese People and issued nationwide as a postage stamp.

He often said, “I am first an art educator, then a painter.” He treated copying, drawing from life, and creation as essential methods for Chinese painting, and sketching as the foundation of visual art.