INTRODUCTION

Yu Hong is a contemporary Chinese artist who finds poetry in the everyday. She exhibits rich technical skills as a painter, rendering figures with endearing expression and verve. She mastered these skills as a student in the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. As she has matured as an artist, Yu Hong has fine-tuned her skills of observation, and is extremely sensitive to both facial expression and body posture. Her subjects usually consist of herself, her friends, family, and now her young daughter, Liu Wa. She doesn’t dose her images with heavy symbolism or sentimentality. She focuses on the value of the individual in scenes of everyday life.

This exhibition contains two groups of new works: 6 oil on canvas paintings initiating a new series titled Routine, and a set of 15 works on paper that chronicle the lives of Yu Hong and her daughter. The Routine series, featured downstairs, glorifies everyday activities such as shopping, swimming, and laughing with friends. These beautiful and inventive compositions rendered in sparkling brushwork, make us pause and reconsider such moments as poetry. We are prompted to recognize the value of the routine activities that fill our days, whether we live in China or America.

The set of 15 upstairs is a spin-off of her recent Witness to Growth series, in which Yu Hong used her own family photographs to create a self-portrait for each year of her life, and a portrait for each year of her daughter’s life. For the works in this exhibition, the figures have been lifted from their original settings and transposed onto abstract, brightly-colored backgrounds—a feature of Yu Hong’s earlier works in the 1990s. With the individual separated from their surroundings, the viewer is focused on the state of mind and expression of the figures to an even greater degree.

~Marian Mazzone, Curator