Yamin Young was born in 1959 in the city of Shanghai, China. He was a child of eight when the Cultural Revolution began. Yamin’s father was a sea captain and his mother was a professor at the Suzhou Art Institute. Suzhou is a traditional art center and is known as the Venice of the East. He developed his deep interest in art from his mother. His bold creativity was an inheritance from his father. Yamin took a large measure of his inspiration from works of art from the Tang Dynasty whose artists painted in simple elegant lines. Some of these paintings have a Matisse like quality. There is an international as well as a distinctive Chinese quality about the Dunhuang art because the caves were positiioned on the famous East West Silk Route, made famous by Marco Polo.