Yang Yongliang grew up in the 1980s in Jiading, an old, water town south of the Yangtze River where stone bridges connect to canal-side streets. For more than a decade as a child, Yongliang studied traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy at the home studio of master artist Yang Yang. After Yongliang left home in the late 1990s, Jiading became a new district as part of the Shanghai development zone; the city administration decided to modernize Jiading. By the time he returned home after college, the old water town had been demolished.
Yongliang studied digital art at the Shanghai Institute of Design/China Academy of Art. He took countless pictures of Shanghai in the early 2000s while the city was rapidly changing. As much as he admired the new high-rise buildings, Yongliang also wanted to capture traces of the broken houses and construction sites before they disappeared like his hometown. On a small CRT monitor, he deconstructed the pictures using photo editing software, and rearranged them to compose his first digital Chinese landscape ‘painting’. When Yongliang saw a printed copy of the digital hand-scroll for the first time, in 2005, his childhood memories finally reappeared.