Born in 1972 in San Francisco, he graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute and Yale University and currently lives and works in New York. His work follows in the tradition of American abstraction and Action Painting. At the core of his creations are a variety of dynamic, brutal, and sometimes dangerous performances, where he collaborates with unconventional participants like bikers, pit bulls, or tattoo artists. These performances are captured on video, and their outcomes are later reworked by the artist in his studio into paintings, sculptures, or other artifacts.

Aaron Young is best known for his Greeting Cards, for which he used a group of bikers and moved them on specially prepared surfaces (several layers of paint superimposed under a layer of black acrylic). The burnt tyre marks mixed with the tracks left by the skidding of the motorcycles caused coloured curves from layers of lower colours to appear on these monochrome plates. Large pieces were then selected by the artist and then reworked in his studio.

With his sculptures, Aaron Young likes to play on contrasts by combining the concepts of aggression and violence with delicate elements resulting in Murano glass wrecking balls, glass barbed wire or metal barriers bent and gilded with fine gold.