 He apprenticed for a famous comic book (连环画) publisher in Shanghai, and began his early career in book illustrations.In 1954 Yao got accepted into the prestigious Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (浙江美术学院) in Hang Zhou, one of the two top art colleges in the country at that time.In college, Yao majored in figure painting and studied traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy techniques under Pan Tianshou (潘天寿), a renowned artist and art educator.