Assistant Professor Crystal Hui-Shu Yang has taught drawing, watercolor, and art education at the University of North Dakota since 2003. She received her BA degree from Chinese Culture University in Taipei, Taiwan; her MFA in painting from Radford University in Virginia; and her PhD in Art with an emphasis in art education from the University of Georgia.

Although Yang’s early Buddhist theme paintings conveyed human suffering in this grievous world, she recently started to work on a new series related to the imaginative Buddha land. In 2004, Yang visited the Longmen Caves and Binglinsi Caves in China where she observed monumental Buddhist carvings as well as the Mogao grottoes (wherein 492 caves house more than 45,000 square meters of wall paintings and 2,415 colored stucco sculptures). The Buddhist art of the Mogao temple (also known as the art of Dunhuang) was created between the 4th and 14th centuries. Dunhuang, a trading oasis on the Silk Road situated in the Gobi desert and the beginning and the ending points of a perilous long journey, received countless caravan during its heydays. Stopping by at the temple of Mogao, survivors from the west gave gratitude to Buddha, while travelers from the east prayed forsafety in the face of an unpredictable future. The impermanency of life was deeply perceived here. Through art, the perpetual Buddha lands were visualized to console the earthly hearts.
Yang has drawn inspiration from Dunhuang art since her undergraduate years in Taiwan. Dunhuang, wherein the Western and Eastern cultures met during the medieval era, has a symbolic meaning to her.

After the trip to Dunhuang, Yang explains how her life and art were impacted by death and birth:

I lost my mother when I was four months pregnant. In the last week of my mother’s life, I recovered a copy of Five Sutras of the Pure Land in storage. Through reading the sutras, I envisaged the afterlife paradise of bliss—a world constructed with the seven treasures: gold, silver, lapis lazuli, crystal, agate, ruby, and cornelian. I described my vision to my mother. At the moment, I saw sparkles in her eyes, although she was no longer able to speak or move her paralyzed body then. I believe that she was finally free from her carnal body, which caused endless pain and agony in the last three years of her life. In the past two years, I have searched for my visual language to materialize the eternal Buddha land. It may take several years for me to complete this Buddhist series.