Working across painting and sculpture, Yan Kong is a London-based artist and PhD researcher at the University of the Arts London. His research focuses on the legacy of post-socialist art and painting in China examined through Marxist aesthetics, postcolonial cultural studies and contemporary Chinese art. Kong’s practice investigates how inherited visual systems can be critically reworked to rethink ideology, cultural identity and artistic subjectivity. In My Mountain III, he extends his reconstruction of socialist realist landscape painting into a more introspective register, shifting towards literati-inflected abstraction and gestural marks that evoke yi (意), transforming ideological landscape into a site of meditative, self-reflective experience.