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.

n the last five years, Young has concentrated on projects that pay tribute to cross-cultural humanitarians. In 2009, he presented an installation at St. Matthaus at the Kulturforum in Berlin, titled Bonhoeffer in Harlem. The second project presented in Melbourne in 2010, Safety Zone, is concerned with an incident in Nanjing in 1937, where the deeds of twenty-one foreigners have remained to this day relatively unknown. In March 2011, Young will present an exhibition in Sydney titled Empathy, in which he collaborated with Malaysian-born furniture designer Khai Liew.