Huang Yongping was a Chinese-French contemporary artist and one of the most well known Chinese Avant-garde artists of his time. Born in Xiamen, he was recognized as the most controversial and provocative artist of the Chinese art scene of the 1980s. Huang was one of the earliest contemporary Chinese artists to consider art as strategy. As a self-taught student, some of his earliest artistic inspirations came from Joseph Beuys, John Cage, and Marcel Duchamp. He later graduated from art school in Hangzhou in 1982, and formed Xiamen Dada in 1986. Huang's oeuvre can be characterized by four periods: anti-artistic affectation, anti-self-expression, anti-art, and anti-history.