Often appearing in Yang Na’s paintings is an imaginary sprite with big eyes, long lashes, and full, sexy lips. This glamorous girl is ‘Nana,’ an incarnation of Yang Na and a beautiful immortal spirit living in a virtual world. Yang Na transforms her virtualised self into symbols and the non-existent imaginary world into concrete images that can be seen and felt. Yang Na paints her personal life experience on canvas in a mixture of real and imagined language and ideas. Her works are dazzling, but at the same time very representational. Using a variety of fair but false objects, piled together, she creates an illusionary but blurry image. Her works often include a gigantic Noah’s Ark bearing a multitude of people and a wealth of information. Yang Na formalises her own virtual self. The incredible face in the work expresses youth, innocence and pretentiousness. And with a pair of wandering, intoxicating and enchanting eyes, an enticingly amorous mouth, her artwork display the beauty of youth, which is rich with contradiction, heterogeneity and morbidity, Yang Na was born in Sichuan, China in 1982. She now lives and works in Beijing.
Source: Bremer, Stanley, Victoria Lu, and Edward K. de Bock. 2011. Future pass. Rotterdam: Wereldmuseum.