Published by Thircuir Ltd. in 2011, *Yang Yongliang* is a compact, 96-page monograph devoted to the Shanghai artist’s densely constructed photographic landscapes. His subject is the transformation of the contemporary Chinese city: towers, construction cranes, and expanding infrastructure overtake the natural world, turning urban development into both spectacle and warning.

Yang builds these scenes through photomontage, drawing on the forms and spatial conventions of traditional Chinese ink-wash landscape painting. From a distance, an image may retain the order of a classical mountain panorama; closer attention reveals architecture and machinery occupying the places of rocks, forests, and mist. This tension gives the work its distinctive double register. Cultural memory remains visible, but it has been reorganized by the scale and velocity of modernization.

The resulting landscapes operate as ecological fables rather than straightforward records of place. Their illusionism encourages slow looking, while their profusion of detail resists a single, stable reading. Past and present do not appear as separate realms: they are compressed into a deliberately disorienting image of a future already taking shape. The work therefore speaks not only to changes in Shanghai, the city that informed Yang’s practice, but also to wider questions about how inherited visual languages can describe contemporary conditions.

Issued in paperback as part of a series on contemporary Chinese photography, the book presents Yang’s work alongside concise contextual writing; David Rosenberg is listed among its contributors. For collectors, its importance lies in the clarity with which it sets out a defining artistic proposition in book form. The small format creates an especially pointed encounter with images whose apparent grandeur rewards close inspection, making the volume a focused document of photography’s dialogue with Chinese painting, urbanization, and environmental unease in the early 2010s.