Goodbye to anger
Yang, who studied first in the Department of Visual Communication Design at Kun Shan University in Tainan and then in the graduate school of National Taiwan University of Arts, was a prodigy during his student days. He won countless awards before the age of 27. But he was not happy. He explains: “Although I won a lot of prizes, there was one accolade I couldn’t get: my own self-approval!”
During his childhood Yang was separated from his parents for over ten years, and during those days of living in other people’s care, the naturally sensitive boy became filled with anger and insecurity. The creative world, with an absence of fixed and rigid standards, became his outlet.
Unable to draw, Yang turned to photography. His photographs from that period—cryptic works filled with a sense of alienation—show scenes from his inner life.
One day Yang happened upon a collection of books on paper cutting art, printed by Echo Publishing Corporation. He felt very attracted to one of the works inside, with its clean, simple lines and splashy colors. Imagining that the author must be a very happy person to produce such creative works, a curious Yang decided to find out for himself.
He applied for a grant from the Cloud Gate Dance Theater under their “Wanderers” program, and went off to remote Shaanxi Province in mainland China, in order to visit for himself the source of the work in the book. But when he got there, he was dumbfounded. It turned out that the cut-paper composition came from Ku Shulan, an elderly lady living in Shaanxi, whose photo Yang showed at his 2016 TEDxTaoyuan talk. Ku, completely white-haired by the time Yang met her, lived in a simple house in the loess region of Shaanxi, with yellowed newspaper covering the walls, and a bed knocked together from some odd planks of wood. A small stone slab was her only platform for drafting and cutting her works.
Her life was harsh, and her past even rougher. At age four she was sent to another family as a bride-in-waiting, and she was forced into a loveless marriage at 17. Incredibly, her hardscrabble existence did not diminish the high spirits and joy of her creations. Everywhere in her works you could see dancing people, bright colors, and a spirit of jubilation.
“She had more reason to give up on life than I did. Why didn’t she? Maybe because she saw beauty in the world.” After his three-month journey ended, Yang felt much more at ease, but still he had not even once put his hand to actually cutting paper.
For the next seven years, Yang returned to his alma mater in Tainan as a lecturer, where he started from scratch in relearning how to get along with himself and lived an unostentatious life. It was only when his girlfriend happened to casually make a request that he finally stopped procrastinating and started doing creative cut-paper work. Equipped with nothing but a simple pair of nail scissors, he produced his first work, built around the shape of the Chinese character xi (喜), meaning “happiness” or “well-being.”
At a point where Yang had only produced seven finished products, already a corporate sponsor appeared, inviting him to open a cut-paper workshop, after which firms began showing up in droves to commission works and invite him to participate in shows.