Yu Hong

Shanghai Art Museum, 2004 Shanghai Biennale: Techniques of the Visible, September 2004, pp. 292-293, illustrated in color
Beijing, National Art Museum of China, The Second Beijing International Art Biennale, September 2005, p. 229, illustrated in color

Yu Hong grew up in an intellectual family; her mother Gao Zhenmei was a graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts.  Influenced by her family, she began school earlier than the rest of her peers and started training as a painter at the Beijing Youth Palace while still a schoolchild at the Central Academy’s Middle School for faculty children. She entered the Academy in 1984, just in time to see the heyday of the ’85 Art New Wave movement. Under the progressive professor Dong Xiwen, she was encouraged to explore new themes and methods including works by modern Western masters like Van Gogh and Picasso. For her graduation work, unlike many students at the time who ran to exotic minority regions, she stayed in the city and focused her painterly lens on urban life.

Yu Hong and her husband Liu Xiaodong (Lot 96) later became known as the leaders of the “New Generation” painters, famed for turning the tenacious veracity of the social realist style taught in the academies to the stuff of un-heroic everyday life. Both Liu and Yu consistently produce oil paintings in neorealist style. Yu in particular has turned to women’s stories—those of strangers, her family members, and herself.  During the 1990s, Yu’s aesthetic grew to emphasize individual experience and the immediate living environments of her subjects.

In 2003, Yu started She, a series of about ten paintings of women from various classes in today’s China. Ms. Li Suqin, Farmer on the Outskirts of Beijing, among the first canvases in this series, was first shown at the 2004 Shanghai Biennale, Techniques of the Visible. For this series, Yu asked each of her sitters to provide a typical photograph of herself.  Li Suqin has provided a digitally manipulated tourist photograph of herself at Beidaihe, a seaside town close to Beijing. Before painting Ms. Li Suqin, Yu collected various views of the woman’s living environment, and grew fascinated by the weight-lifting equipment in her home. On juxtaposing the photographs provided by her sitters and her own painterly rendering of these sitters, Yu says, “On the left side, I am a viewer looking at her life; on the right side, it is she who wants to define herself in a social setting.” Unlike Liu, who focuses on portraying his characters in fictional settings to create new narratives, Yu remains more faithful to reality, choosing to let the environment and the sitter define the character and tone of each painting.