Many of Yang Yongliang's most breath-taking works depict a landscape in a style that recalls the lyrical, brush and ink paintings of the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279). In a typical Southern Song dynasty “one-corner” painting, the foreground typically features trees and possibly a scholar enjoying nature. In the distance, a mountain dotted with trees and textured by inky brushstrokes that represent its flinty, vegetation-covered surfaces looms large to fill the space. But while Yang's compositions are closely reminiscent of his Southern Song models, his works are full of surprises.

The artist frequently substitutes metal lattice-work towers, or pylons, that carry overhead electricity lines in place of the craggy pine tree that one would expect to see in a Southern Song dynasty landscape. The foreground in one of Yang's works might feature a ramshackle modern building, a bicycle, and possibly some rubbish instead of the small garden kiosk visited by an elegantly robed scholar with a picnic at hand that a twelfth-or thirteenth-century artist might have presented. At first the distant mountains in Yang's works seem to be thickly covered with trees and vegetation brushed with ink strokes, but, a second look shockingly reveals that the “trees” are actually tall metal pylons and the texture strokes that describe the mountain surface are composed of densely layered images of monumental skyscraper buildings.