Formed in 2002 by Zheng Guogu (b. 1970, Yangjiang, China), Chen Zaiyan (b. 1971, Yangchun, China), and Sun Qinglin (b. 1974, Yangjiang), Yangjiang Group takes its name from the southern coastal city where the artists are based. Intentionally locating themselves away from megacity cultural centers in China like Beijing or Guangzhou, they work in a relatively solitary environment in their self-designed studio. Collaboration and participation are hallmarks of Yangjiang Group’s practice. Known for its playful attacks on traditional calligraphy and attempts to subvert sociocultural conventions and values, their practice takes shape in many different formats such as painting, multimedia installation, and performance using materials like wax, food, and ink. Audience participation is a significant component of their work; ordinary events like eating, gambling, tea sipping, and binge drinking are vital to their convivial working process and cultivation of community-based exhibition experiences. For instance, for the ongoing series After Dinner Shufa (2009– ), the artists create improvised calligraphic assemblages using leftover party food on paper. In doing so, they blur distinctions between art and life, the public and the private, and high and low culture. For Das Kapital Football (2009–15), Yangjiang Group invited the public to transcribe the German philosopher and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx’s Kapital: Kritik de politischen Oekonomie (Capital: Critique of Political Economy, 1867) by hand onto more than 7,000 pages of rice paper. The pages were scattered onto a field where the participants were invited to play an unconventional game of soccer. The gesture of trampling over words often upheld as philosophical and political tenets through game-playing reveals their provocation to topple rules and generate new possibilities of social and political engagement through play. Their latest interactive installation Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken (2016), commissioned for the Guggenheim Museum, consists of calligraphy works, an outdoor Chinese-style garden, a blood pressure–measuring station, and an area for a social tea gathering, proposing the museum’s potential for an alternative social structure. Yangjiang Group has had solo shows at Eastside Projects, Birmingham, United Kingdom (2012); Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2013–14); 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney (2015); and Museo nazionale delle arti dell XXI secolo, Rome (2015). They have participated in international exhibitions and biennials including The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China, Tate Liverpool (2007); China Welcomes You . . . Desires, Struggles, New Identities, Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2007); Documenta, Kassel, Germany (2007); Sprout from White Nights, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2008); Lyon Biennial, France (2009–10); Zizhiqu: Autonomous Regions, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou (2013); Auckland Triennial (2013); and Tales of Our Time, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2016–17). Yangjiang Group lives and works in Yangjiang.