John Young
Young Ze Runge or John Young is a Hong Kong-born Australian artist. During the Cultural Revolution in China, he was sent to Australia to complete his education. In the 1970s, he read philosophy at U of Sydney, in particular, the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in the early 1980s he went on a pilgrimage to Ireland, London, and Europe to visit Wittgenstein's sites of significance. Young began his exhibiting career with a solo exhibition comprising a work shown for one minute on the door of a hut in the small fishing village of Rosroe, Connemara, Ireland in 1982. On his return from Europe, he was a founding member of the artists' group, Various Artists Ltd. Since that time, he has worked on many series of works, in particular, the Silhouette series (1985-89), the Polychromes series (1989-93), and more recently the Double Ground and Square Painting series. This later work revolves around such issues as frameworks of representation, mood states, certainty, the plight of Asians in the diaspora, and images in and memories of cultural tourism.