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This work of art features an interplay between different media: photography and landscape painting, as well as tattooing and body modification. These photographs tell a rich story about history and culture in China. China’s Cultural Revolution under the leadership of Mao Zedong led to stringent control of artistic expression, including the repression of photography. During the same period, calligraphy and traditional landscape painting were denounced as elitist. Even following Mao’s death, it was only after the Shanghai Biennale in 2000 that a few galleries begin to emerge in China to support the burgeoning field of photography. The Shanghai Center of Photography was founded in 2015, and the Lianzhou Museum of Photography opened in 2017. But even today, academic departments teaching the discipline of photography as an art form are rare, and photography is not well represented in Chinese art museums. The brief explosion of photography as an artform in China in the 1990s and early 2000s, in which Huang Yan played an important role, is an important component of the history of photography in general. The artist’s exploration of traditional shan-shui literati ink and brush painting, executed on the nude female body, transforms this medium into a highly taboo subject. The cultural subversions at play in these compositions will doubtless be fascinating for our audiences to explore. Yan’s own words on the subject are illuminating: “Landscape is an abode in which my mortal body can reside, landscape is my rejection of worldly wrangling, landscape is a release for my Buddhist ideas.”