Jun Yang (artist)  Jun Yang (born 1975) () is a Chinese-Austrian contemporary artist who lives and works in Vienna, Taipei, and Yokohama. Jun Yang was born in 1975, in Qingtian, China. When he was four years old, his family immigrated to Europe, intending to reach Belgium but instead settling in Vienna, Austria. Although his mother and father were not professional chefs, they found work in a Chinese restaurant, and later went into the restaurant business for themselves. Yang was continually aware of his outsider status while growing up, first as an immigrant in Austria, then as an Austrian in Europe, and later as a foreign passport-holder in China. The varying cultural contexts in which Yang was born and raised became sources of inspiration for his artistic projects, which focus on issues of identity, biography, social change, language, and authenticity. Yang received his higher education at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he studied under Michelangelo Pistoletto. Jun Yang's work includes video, film, sculpture, installations, performance art, and interior and public space design. Beginning in 1997, Yang undertook a series of performance pieces titled "As I Saw" in Vienna, Cahors (1999), Paris (2000), Wolfsburg (2000), Leipzig (2001), and Stockholm (2002). For each performance he chose an image from a local newspaper and recreated it out of newsprint in a gallery space. He also shot a series of photo booth performances including "As I Saw (Photo booth)" (1997) and "from salariiman to superman" (1997). From 1999-2000, Yang was an artist-in-residence at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, where he used video and installation art to explore the aesthetics of Chinese restaurants and Chinatowns from Hollywood films, as well as his own family's history of emigration and restaurant ownership. After 2001, he opened a number of restaurants in Vienna, including "ra'mien" and "ra'mien go", which he considered to be a continuation of his art and design work, rather than purely commercial ventures. Works such as "Soldier Woods" (2002), "Mail for..." (2006), and "Jun Yang meets Jun Yang" (2015) dealt with questions of language, naming, and identity. Yang branched out into film-making with "A Short-Story on Forgetting and Remembering" (2007), "Norwegian Woods" (2008), "Seoul Fiction" (2010), and "The Age of Guilt and Forgiveness" (2016).