The Century Mountain Project is an East/West collaboration of art between the Chinese poet and calligrapher Huang Xiang and American artist William Rock. Their paintings, which feature Huang Xiang's calligraphy and poetry and William Rock's painted portraits, honor outstanding thinkers, creators, discoverers, leaders—essentially people who stood out like mountains throughout the centuries. Their subjects include Mozart, Lincoln, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Rimbaud, Phillis Wheatley, Li Bai, Murasaki Shikibu, Malcolm X, Isadora Duncan, and Edgar Allan Poe.
In 2009, their portrait of Anne Frank was exhibited at the Peter Wilhelm Art Center in Budapest; and in June 2010 an exhibit of Huang Xiang and William Rock's Century Mountain paintings was organized by the city of Tarragona, Spain.
The artwork created between Huang Xiang and William Rock began in 2006 and continues as an ongoing collaboration. There is no cultural, gender, or race distinctions with regard to the subjects depicted.
Seeing the collaborative paintings of Huang Xiang and William Rock is like having a personal encounter with the subject depicted. They have life. This Western style image with calligraphy is not what one usually sees. William Rock is aware of the negative space and Huang Xiang is using the calligraphy to create as an artist would. Formally the artists are opening to accommodate each other. Both artists working together as one. Huang Xiang knows intuitively and instinctively how to place the calligraphy in relation to the image. The calligraphy of Huang Xiang is special, modern and personal. It is striking! An East/West collaboration, the work is like that of Xu Bing. The fact that Huang Xiang's calligraphy is making commentary about the image adds to the many layers of this work. The paintings have a lot of energy." — Dr. Stanely Murashige, Specialist in contemporary Chinese art / The Art Institute of Chicago
Huang Xiang early life
Huang Xiang was born on December 26, 1941, in Guidong County of Hunan Province. At the time of his birth there occurred a great fire. The fire spreading through his neighborhood reached the very wall of the family compound; newborn Huang and his mother, still connected by the umbilical cord, had to be carried to safety to a nearby temple.
Huang's father was in charge of supply for the army group that fought the GMD's last great campaign in Shenyang Province of Manchuria in 1948. The decisive battle there, 'Liaoshen,' was won by the communists, and Huang's father was captured. The family learned late in 1951 that earlier that year Huang's father had been summarily shot in a prison camp near Beijing.
Huang Xiang was only nine years old when he first personally suffered similar treatment. One day in all innocence he pulled an ailing fish from the village well. Immediately the village headman grabbed him and accused him of poisoning the well. For three nights Huang was bound in a dark room, and paraded daily through the streets wearing a dunce cap bearing the legend "Huang Xiang counterrevolutionary poisoner of wells." He was only released when chemical analysis failed to detect any poison in the fish.
Although an excellent student in grade school, he was not permitted to matriculate into middle school because of his class origins. The denial of public education left Huang Xiang feeling severely hurt, for he strongly desired to continue his schooling. The quandary was soon alleviated, however, when he discovered in a concealed loft in his grandparents, home a treasure trove of college books that his father had put away years earlier. Though aged only ten, he began reading them with a will. Most of the books were in Chinese; they included classic works of Lao Tzu, Zhuangzi, Li Bo and Du Fu, plus political treatises by Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek and others, as well as books of literature, political economy, philosophy, religion and the arts. there was also translation of major western authors, poets and statesman, plus the French "Declaration of Right" and the American "Declaration of Independence." moreover there were the extensive notes made by his father in a notebook, including quotations from Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, as well as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Marx, Freud and others.