As a young artist, Huang Yan first love was traditional landscape painting. He held a fascination for the literati art movement that influenced artists of the Song Dynasty and used nature as the primary subject in paintings. The Literati later adopted a reverence for nature into their own lifestyle, believing in a simple life without attachment to modern accoutrements; what was originally an aesthetic movement became a spiritual one. Huang Yan has adapted the literati aesthetic to contemporary life. The artist advocates the preservation of traditional Chinese art with his trademark technique of painting traditional landscapes on human canvas – or body painting.