October 17-22, Yang Yanping's exhibition in Beijing is going to be her first in China in nearly 30 years. Art critic Jia Fanzhou comments her work that "As early as in early 1980s, Yang Yanping was an well-known name in the Chinese art world. Her work was impressive because of its refreshing style and a highly exquisite sense of form." In 1984 art historian James Cahill recommended Yang Yanping to the curator of Contemporary Chinese Painting exhibition, therefore her paintings toured in eight cities in the United States. Cahill wrote, "Any movement that includes such diverse and innovative masters as Wu Guangzhong, Li Huasheng, and Yang Yanping is certainly not stagnating. I mean only to hazard the observation that the non-landscape continuity within Chinese painting, so strong in recent centuries may very well be returning to the forefront. " In early 1980s, the British Museum bought her work Autumn Lotus Pond as one of the highlights in the exhibition Collecting the 20th century. Yang yanping and her husband Zeng Shanqing left Beijing for the United States in 1986. During her stay overseas, Yang Yanping exhibited extensively in Tokoyo, London, New York and Vienna. Her status as a world-class artist was consolidated in 1995, when her work Dawn was selected as one of the twelve art works featured by the memorial calendar marking the 50 anniversary of the United Nations.Art historian Michael Sullivan believes, that Yang Yanping's works are "perfect fusion of vision, form and feeling that informs all great art". In his preface for this exhibition, Sullivan wrote that "Still more typical have been the paintings of lotus plants – not in the splendour of their full flowering, but in an autumnal state, when the dying blossoms and leaves, almost transparent in their decay, bend over silent pool. The miracle is that these paintings are not melancholy in their atmosphere but, because of their sumptuous colour, full of an exhilarating freshness and warmth. The word “beauty” is not fashionable today, because many people think that beauty has nothing to do with art, where the merit is the “idea”, or the “concept”. By comparison with followers of that school, Yang Yanping shows us in thesepaintings what a dead end purely conceptual art generally is”.