Yu Hong

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“You only need to change your perspective to discover that this world is very unfamiliar.”

–Yu Hong

Yu Hong was born in 1966 in Xi’an, China. In the 1980s she studied oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing and graduated with a post-graduate degree from the oil painting department in 1996. Since 1988 she has been a teacher in CAFA’s oil painting department. From the start, Yu Hong received training in realist painting, which over time would translate into her own individual aesthetic language. The core subject of Yu Hong’s paintings has always been human nature, and how human beings grow and exist in this society, in this world. Those figures, painted down by her brush express the feelings and self-analysis of people thrown into the reality of society.

The spirit of Yu Hong’s creation most often arises from her personal life and the surroundings of quotidian existence, constructing a world which ingeniously fuses together perceptions of time and memories through art, as well as adeptly seizing the sporadic evolution of the emotions of human self-experience. The series “Witness to Growth” (1999- ongoing) acts as a sort of record of life, while touching upon the current events of each year of her life. Yu Hong often uses existing images as a starting point for her art, taking photographs and her own point of view to create compositions and rearrange them in renewed combinations which emphasize the objective connotations of memory, and investigate the way in which pre-existing images can be re-used and strengthened in new compositions. In the “Gold” Series (2010-2011) of paintings, this feeling for form takes on its most poetic level. In this series, the artist’s intensive studies into the traditional Chinese paintings of Dunhuang, the murals of the Kizil Cave complex and traditional Western painterly traditions take form, interweaving a sensitivity towards art historical traditions and contemporary daily life. For the series “Wandering Clouds” (2013), Yu Hong interviewed six individuals asking them about their internal states, their personal histories, all circling around the topic of “clouds of anxiety”. Yu Hong was attempting to express not only these six people’s individual sorrows, but also the universality of the experiences of human beings in society, and to understand the core of people’s depressions. In this series, Yu Hong worked in a state of deep sensitivity and circumspection, looking behind an individual’s seemingly obscured emotions and digging these out to realize a fresh and expansive spiritual power and space. Executed during around the same time, “On the Clouds” (2013) was conversely an attempt by the artist to combine a spatial concept with the landscapes of daily life, using a more theatrical method of expressing the uncertainties with which life is filled. Continuing from the same imaginative dimension as “On the Clouds”, the “Concurrent Realms” (2014-2015) series of works, floated into a world of fantastic fables and reality, it can be seen as a turning point in Yu Hong’s painting career, in which the artist’s uniquely majestic imagination along with various disparate nations, regions and cultures are ultimately combined together to form a single entity. In many aspects, it is in fact a linking together of influences and structural points, and Yu Hong utilizes parallel constructs to emotionally blend together macro- and microscopic points of view, yet still ultimately focusing on the same circumstances of being an individual within a larger groups, affirming that the encounters between humans will continue to sustain Yu Hong’s creation as an artist and remain her focus.