Playing Mahjong/Win Extra Point for Self-Drawn Pairing. Yao's "Wonderful" series subverts orthodox Chinese painting both through its choice of materials and content. This particular painting, which shows Yao playing mahjong with friends, is rife with a sense of conflict between the new and the old. (courtesy of Yao Jui-chung)

It's no exaggeration to describe Yao Jui-chung both as the most representative figure in the realm of contemporary Taiwanese art and also as an artist who is coming into his prime.

More than just an art-world luminary of the post-martial-law era, Yao best encapsulates the vitality of the Taiwanese art scene because he wears so many hats, including those of writer, educator, exhibition planner, and gallery executive.

He first burst onto the scene in 1994 with Military Takeover, which took a sardonic look at Taiwanese history. Helping to move Taiwan beyond the tragic wounds of the martial law era, the installation was regarded as a watershed moment in contemporary art on the island. "Artistic creation" and "written exposition" are inextricably intertwined in Yao's work, which almost always features a strong historical resonance. Frequently, Yao aims to subvert authoritarian structures or aesthetic orthodoxies.

In 2007 Yao made a creative leap when he was a resident at the Glenfiddich Artists Village in Scotland. He had previously focused on photography and installations. But at Glenfiddich he made a shift to what art critic Wu Chieh-hsiang describes as "unprecedentedly original methods." Yao began to create an aesthetic spectacle via "ersatz traditional Chinese landscapes." He used fountain and ballpoint pens, gold leaf and other untraditional media to create an abundance of fine lines, which substitute for the changes of depth found in traditional ink-wash painting.

Once started in this vein, he hasn't been able to stop. In mid-April of this year, he unveiled works from his "Honey-moon" series, in which he inserts self-narrative elements to alter classic works of mainstream Chinese art, such as Travelers Among Mountains and Streams by Fan Kuan of the Song Dynasty. Demonstrating growing maturation, the series reveals Yao reaching new heights with this style.

After the lunar New Year, I visited Yao Jui-chung's studio in east Taipei. The appointed hour had passed when I saw Yao-formerly a self-proclaimed "angry young man"-appear in the distance. He was carrying his daughter and looked fatigued. The fatherly tenderness seemed at odds with his bad-boy image.

As Yao soothed his unwell child and arranged for his wife to take the girl to the hospital, he also softly issued apologies for being late.

Since becoming a father, Yao, who was born in 1969, has entered a golden period of creativity. We ascended to his studio, on an apartment building's rooftop, where Yao unveiled one painting after another from his "Honeymoon" series. He explained how each of the works inserts modern people into vast traditional landscapes. Take, for instance, Facebook Chat (whose Chinese name means "unavoidable death" but sounds like "Facebook"). The cynic-protagonist, a recurring figure in Yao's work, sits amid vast mountain forests, occupying only a tiny portion of the painting. Despite the beautiful, unspoiled setting, the man's focus is on his iPad, as he checks his Facebook account.