Zhang Yan

Zhang Yan (Chinese: 张焰; born 18 November 1963 in Neijiang, Sichuan province) is a Chinese oil painter who also worked for many years as a documentary scriptwriter and director for television. He is best known in art circles for two paintings, Iron Staff Lama (1993) and The Cradling Arm (2013), which are held in the permanent collection of the Vatican Museums; the sources describe this as the first permanent collection of works by a living artist at that institution.

He began studying traditional Chinese painting at twelve and Western painting at seventeen. From 1992 to 2002 he focused mainly on documentary writing. In 1992 he worked at the special topics department of Tibet television, where he studied Tibetan culture and history, and Iron Staff Lama dates from this period. In 1997 he moved to Beijing to join the news review department of CCTV, and the following year two of his documentaries were shown at the Hungarian International Television Festival. In 2002 he scripted a program on Egypt's pyramids broadcast jointly by CCTV and National Geographic.

His painting engages with dialogue between Eastern and Western traditions. The Cradling Arm (2013) joined the Vatican collection alongside the 1993 work. In 2018 he was ranked eighteenth on a list of Chinese contemporary artists, and in 2019 his work Prayer was exhibited at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey.