Yang Xueqing, Anne Zhang

    chouchou_yxq@163.com

    PAINTER, performance artist, sand animation performer, independent event planner, philanthropist — Yin Xiaolong is many things, but he only takes pride in being a philanthropist.

    “As an artist, I want to express my thoughts through paintings, installments, performances and music. As a philanthropist, I want to do as much as I can to help people in need and uphold justice and fairness,” Yin declared Tuesday on his Wechat, which has 5,000 followers.

    A philanthropic artist

    After graduating from Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts with a degree in Chinese traditional painting, Yin learned sand painting in 2008 on his own and has become one of the pioneer sand artists in China. He can earn tens of thousands of yuan for one commercial performance.

    However, he didn’t get lost in his fame and success. Instead, he devotes half of his time to charity.

    Yin joined the China Wild Lily Foundation in 2009 when the charitable organization was initiated to help children in Dahua, the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

    He constantly posts information about people in need and calls for donations on his Weibo account. “When people donate, I give them my paintings as thanks,” Yin said. “In 2012 alone, 300,000 yuan (US$49,000) was donated to scores of needy families.”

    Yin now has more than 40,000 followers on Weibo and the celebrity effect brought him more people asking for help.

    “It takes a lot of work to verify the families’ information. It’s really time-consuming,” he said. “I am not able to help every one of them, but I am trying my best to help as many as I can.”

    Constant troubles

    Yin is concerned about social issues and often lashes out about social evils on Weibo and Wechat, which constantly brings him troubles.

    Just before midnight last Friday, he was taken away from his apartment in Bao’an District by a few police officers for interrogation because he posted news about an overhang collapse that had happened that day in Luohu District and made comments on his Weibo account questioning the quality of the building and asking who should be held responsible.

    “I was also ‘invited’ to the police station in mid-April because I did some performance art on the beach at Shenzhen’s Dapeng Bay to protest a proposed liquefied natural gas program in the area,” Yin said.

    He has been interrogated by police six times this year for expressing his thoughts, but the more trouble he gets, the need he feels to express his opinions to help society progress grows stronger, he says.

    “Yin Xiaolong impressed me with his genuineness and abhorrence of evil,” Sun Haifeng, one of Yin’s friends, told Shenzhen Daily. Sun, a professor at Shenzhen University, added that Yin is too genuine to tolerate any injustice, which, sometimes, makes him a target in today’s China.

    “But he is lucky to have friends who understand him and support him,” Sun said.

    Rough childhood

    Yin said his childhood taught him to live life with a grateful heart.

    Yin lost his father when he was 6; then his mother left him. He moved to his grandparents’ home in a small village in Jinan, Shandong Province. “Almost every family in the village offered me meals and they took care of me twice when I was really sick,” he said.

    The best way he can show his thanks is to pay the kindness and love forward to help other people, he says.

    His childhood hardships are also the source of Yin’s sympathy for children. He said most of the charity work he does is to help children.

    He organized a fundraiser in 2009 to assist poverty-stricken children in Guizhou Province who could not afford to go to school. He held a photo exhibition in 2011 to draw people’s attention to a free-lunch campaign initiated by a journalist to help students in rural areas of China get free lunches at school.

    “The power of an individual may be small, but I believe that every single effort counts,” he said.

    Help disabled children

    Yin began paying attention to children with autism and cerebral palsy in 2010 after a Hong Kong professor told him that sand painting is used in the United States to help those kinds of children cope with their disabilities. He became determined to help disabled children with his art skills after he learned more about them from a documentary. He raised 10,000 yuan and recruited about 40 volunteers through a TV program. He donated some sand tables customized for children to two rehabilitation centers in Shenzhen and trained teachers on how to use sand painting to help the children.

    “The children play in the sand every day. The exercises help improve their hand-eye coordination,” he said.

    On this year’s World Autism Awareness Day, Yin organized a performance art piece at the Window of the World Metro station in Nanshan District to raise social awareness about autism and its effects. He and several volunteers asked 101 passersby to silently hold hands with an autistic child for 61 seconds to share their loneliness.

    Concern for

    left-behind children

    Yin also cares about children in rural areas who are left behind by their parents after they move to the cities in search of jobs — a side effect of China’s fast urbanization.

    It’s estimated that China has 60 million left-behind children living with relatives who are not their parents. These children face stark psychological and emotional problems, as well as dangers to their personal safety and well-being.

    “We can’t give these children parental love, but we can at least help improve their living conditions,” Yin said.

    Since 2010, he has taken Shenzhen businesspeople to visit left-behind children in villages in Guizhou Province and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

    “We try our best to help them with some of their difficulties, such as repairing leaky water tanks, refurnishing shabby homes or donating money to them,” Yin said.

    He is now working on producing a music album that will contain at least 10 songs about left-behind children and will be marketed in more than 20 cities across China. Money collected from album sales will be used to establish “happy study” rooms for left-behind children, places where they can learn to play musical instruments or study art and play with volunteers, Yin said.

    “I hope to help move them away from loneliness, bitterness and danger in these rooms so they can have happier lives,” he said.

“As a philanthropist, I want to do as much as I can to help people in need and uphold justice and fairness.”

    — Yin Xiaolong