Billy Childish (born Steven John Hamper, 1959, Chatham, Kent) is a highly distinctive and prolific artist whose practice spans painting, poetry, fiction, photography, film, and music. To date, he has published more than forty poetry collections, several novels, and released over 150 music albums—earning him a reputation as “one of the most independent and unclassifiable figures in contemporary British art.”

Childish’s artistic path has always carried an inner drive and a spirit of resistance. Diagnosed with severe dyslexia as a teenager, he left school at sixteen to work as a stonemason apprentice in the naval dockyards. He was later admitted to several art schools but was expelled from Central Saint Martins in the 1980s for insisting on his uncompromising personal style. This formative experience shaped his lifelong ethos: whether painting, writing, or making music, he remains committed to painting for the sake of painting.

Resisting trends and theoretical excess, Childish keeps a clear and independent stance toward the art world. He distanced himself from the pressures of the market and once remarked in an interview, “I only paint on Mondays—that’s the only time I’m a painter.” This mix of candor, humor, and stubborn honesty has made him a singular presence within British art culture.

Deeply influenced by Van Gogh, Munch, and German Expressionism, his paintings carry a raw emotional temperature. Nature, landscape, and solitary figures recur throughout his work, rendered through instinctive brushwork and dense layers of oil paint. Though visually direct, the paintings maintain a sense of poetic incompleteness—a tension between what is seen and what is felt.

The exhibition at Yi Space brings together Childish’s recent works, many inspired by his travels across the American West—canyons, lakes, pine trees, migrating geese. Hovering between the descriptive and the dream-like, these fragments of experience are transformed into deeply interior emotional landscapes.
“The becoming, unbecoming” not only describes the transitional states of the scenes he depicts, but also reflects our own condition as viewers: always in movement, always in the process of becoming. Rather than presenting a fixed meaning, Childish opens a space where each viewer can encounter color, gesture, and unspoken emotion in their own way.

As one of the key stops among more than 50 exhibitions in the 2025 “Make a Swing” Hangzhou Contemporary Art Week, Yi Space is offering a special Art Week ticket price of 60 RMB. Bring a friend and come “make a swing” through the gallery, experiencing the distinctive visual language of Billy Childish.