Renowned Chinese artist Yang Zhichao is China’s most extreme performance artist. He uses his body as a tool to draw on social issues linking the individual with the greater world. Many of his performances involve painful acts such as branding and surgical processes. Personal pain becomes part of his experience and a means of communication to engage the larger world.

For "Chinese Bible", Yang Zhichao spent three years collecting from second-hand shops the personal diaries of overlapping generations. The 3,000 notebooks inscribed with personal writings span 50 years from 1949 to 1999. The writings reach deep into the very essence of feelings among the Chinese whether emotional, political or even mundane during a half century of monumentally changing times. "Chinese Bible" displays not only the physical objects of the notebooks as an installation but also the process of collecting them as a performance in a both massive yet emotionally touching exhibition.

Yang Zhichao was born in 1963 in Lanzhou, Gansu Province. He graduated from the Art Department of Northwest Normal University in 1987. Yang received the Chinese Contemporary Art Award in 2002. Since 1998, his works have been widely exhibited. Selected exhibitions include Distance: Contemporary Art Invitation Exhibition at Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China; The 52nd Venice Biennial (2007), Venice, Italy and 55 Days in Valencia: Chinese Art Meeting (2008) at Instituto Valenciano de Art Moderno (IVAM), Valencia, Spain.