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 Yu
Hong finds poetry in day-to-day existence. She represents the simple
joys that we all experience, from laughing with friends, to sitting
and thinking quietly, to falling in love and forming a family. Her
focus on the individual extends back to her years as an undergraduate
in the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts
in Beijing, where she received a thorough training in the techniques
of figural realism (1984–88). Initially, her paintings combined
highly realistic portraits with unreal surroundings and colorations,
suggesting a sense of dislocation from the world. Gradually, however,
perhaps reflecting the fact that her life was settling down, Yu
Hong stripped away the surrealistic devices embellishing her art.
At the same time, she honed her skills of observation, so that she
has become extremely sensitive to both facial expression and body
posture.
More often than not, Yu Hong’s subjects are women. Only rarely
in the entire history of Chinese art has the female point of view
been depicted in such an understanding and understated manner. In
general, earlier depictions of women engaged in everyday activities
were created by men, who overlay that subject with endless symbolic
ramifications: they were not interested in depicting women per se,
nor did they care about the female point of view. And now, while
contemporary female artists in China favor the subject of women,
many invest the figures they paint with such heavy doses of symbolism
that the value of the individual is lost. Yu Hong honors the individual
in all phases of life, from childhood to maturity.
The current exhibition exemplifies Yu Hong’s rare combination
of observational powers and technical facility as a painter, and
includes two groups of works representing the latest developments
in her oeuvre. The first is a set of fifteen paintings chronicling
the artist’s life—a spin-off from Witness to Growth, a
project that has occupied her for several years. The second, a group
of six paintings, is the start of a new series that takes up a new
thread, describing everyday activities. This series is called Routine.
Both groups focus on the absolutely mundane, but with such intensity
that we are led from contemplation of the commonplace to an appreciation
of the broader currents of life.
In 2000, Yu Hong commenced work on Witness to Growth, a series of
paintings that has occupied her for the past several years. For
each year of her life, she has painted a one meter square canvas
with an image of herself, based on a photograph taken at the time.
Whether posed or spontaneous, the photographs’ compositions
and coloring capture something essential about the visual sense
of their times. In making her selection of which photograph to reproduce,
and then in adapting the photographic image to suit her memory of
the time, Yu Hong condenses her experience to defining moods and
moments. Breaking the pattern of one painting per year, two paintings
mark her twenty-ninth year: in one she is pregnant; in the next
she has given birth. From that time on, a second series of paintings,
chronicling the life of her daughter Liu Wa, year by year, joins
the first. In viewing these paintings, we recognize the transitory
nature of the moments represented. Unexpectedly, the fleeting emotions
captured in paint trigger memories of comparable moments in our
own lives: somehow the specificity of Yu Hong’s self-portraits
is not a barrier to our self-recognition, but rather a catalyst.
 When
the Witness to Growth series was first published, Yu Hong chose
a newspaper or magazine spread to complement each image. For example,
next to a painting of herself aged six months, napping in her stroller,
the artist placed a contemporaneous China Pictorial spread depicting
“Chairman Mao reviewing the rank and file of the Great Cultural
Revolution for the first time.” He stands in a jeep, waving
to massed soldiers. Fast asleep in her stroller, Yu Hong is oblivious
to the unfolding drama of history, seemingly as confidently in control
of her world as Mao was of his. The juxtaposition of political and
social events with events of equal moment to an individual—such
as the birth of a sibling, a marriage, or the building of a house—sets
up a tension, highlighting the loose relationship between outer
and inner events.
In the set of fifteen works rendered in pastel on paper for the
current exhibition, Yu Hong has recast images from the original
Witness to Growth series, extracting the individual from the surroundings.
Whether it be Yu Hong or her daughter who is represented, the figures
are complete in the moment, utterly self-sufficient. In the absence
of setting, we concentrate more closely on the figures’ momentary
state of mind. The monochrome background washes, often acid-toned,
color our interpretation of the figures’ emotions. In this
usage of startling color juxtapositions, Yu Hong is drawing on her
color sense developed in the later 1980s, to great effect. Against
a mustard background wash, two-year-old Yu Hong, sporting a large
Mao badge, walks hand-in-hand with her mother. Wearing a green sweater,
at age six she leans pensively on one elbow, the acid green backdrop
throwing her into a surreal space: what could she be thinking? Aged
twenty-one, she poses with friends in front of Mao’s portrait
in Tiananmen (his visage is the only extraneous context we are offered
in any of these paintings). At twenty-six, Yu Hong appears in the
film, The Days, and the next year, she marries painter Liu Xiaodong.
Liu Wa at age six hugs a soccer ball: restricted to pinks and red,
with touches of black and white, this painting radiates warmth and
happiness. Liu Wa appears to be more connected with the world than
her dreamy mother at that age.
Concerning her new series, Routine, Yu Hong says: “All six
Routine paintings are about my daily life. Like most of us, I lead
a life of trivialities. It is how life really is.” Accordingly,
in these paintings she shops for fruit, shops for vegetables and
laughs with friends. The sometimes jarring color schemes and inventive
compositions framing these day-to-day activities give us pause,
leading us to reconsider the value of the trivialities that fill
our days. Pulling us further along in our musings, Yu Hong has paired
each painting with a newspaper or magazine article. As she relates:
“All the news clippings are about how we Chinese spend money.
The Chinese government is trying to build a ‘well-off society,’
and I find there is a certain interesting relationship between individuals
and their patterns of consumption in such a well-off society.”
It is worth contemplating her pairings.
-Britta
Erickson
If you would
like to purchase a copy of this catalogue (with over 30 color images
and additional text) please contact
us via email with your address and the number of catalogues
you would like to purchase.
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