Born in 1971 in Xiangxiang, Hunan Province, Yang graduated in 1994 from the Tianjin-based Nankai University where he majored in English. A student of veteran Tianjin calligrapher Sun Boxiang and Hunan calligrapher Yan Jialong, he also studied at the calligraphy studies program of Tianjin Liberal Arts Institute from 1993-94. Since 1994, he has worked as a journalist at the Beijing-based China Daily, a national English-language newspaper. From 1998-99, he attended an English journalism fellowship program in the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the United States, where he also studied western modern art history, arts administration and art criticism. Meanwhile, he worked as a researcher and translator on late Chinese painting and calligraphy at the Honolulu Academy of Arts' Asian art department. In the US, he started introducing to the West China's Modern Calligraphy Artistic Movement and its representative artists. His previous experience as president of the Nankai Society of Calligraphy and Painting proved to be the prelude of his more active involvement in the national art scene in recent years. Yang served as deputy secretary-general and a board director of the China Society of Modern Calligraphic Art as well as director of its overseas liaisons commission. Author of numerous articles on art and a Chinese-English catalog on modern calligraphy, he has co-organized some important art activities of modern calligraphy and modern art in China and abroad. He has exhibited in some calligraphy exhibitions and held two solo shows in Tianjin and Hawaii. Currently an art critic and editor for the China Daily and www.china-gallery.com English edition, Yang is pursuing a MA degree in arts administration at the Art Studies Department of Peking University.