Yu Hong

signed in Pinyin and dated 2003; signed in Pinyin, titled in Chinese and dated 2003 on the reverse, framed

Art Galaxy, Shanghai

USA, Charleston, The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, A Woman's Life: The Art of Yu Hong, May to June, 2003
USA, New York, Goedhuis Contemporary, A Woman's Life: The Art of Yu Hong, September to October, 2003, pp. 2 and 12

This work is generally in good condition. There are several craquelures in the center left quadrant measuring around 8 cm in diameter, but they do not affect the overall appearance of the work. Please note that it was not examined under ultraviolet light.
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Note: This works comes with the front page of Beijing Youth Daily which exhibited alongside with the painting during its US touring exhibitions in 2003, measured 37 by 51 cm.; 14½ by 20 in.

Routine – Meet at the Party
Yu Hong

China’s New Generation Art movement, which began in the nineties, saw the emergence of artists such as Yu Hong, along with her husband Liu Xiaodong. The artists of this period adopted a painting style that was true to reality, often facing it uncompromisingly head-on. Having graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Yu sought to capture the precious fragments of day-to-day life, but decided to shy away from the realism favoured by her Academy. Instead, she opted for the styles of Political Pop and Cynical Realism, both of which were prevalent painting motifs of the nineties. There is no doubt that Yu Hong’s work captures perfectly Chinese society of the epoch. The piece on offer is her 2003 work, Routine – Meet at the Party (Lot 715). This work, which belongs to her Routine series, has been previously exhibited in New York. The piece exudes a feminine sensitivity of sorts, and depicts a private moment together with the artist’s friends. Routine – Meet at the Party departs from Lu’s personal life, and underscores an entire generation’s lifestyle, providing a unique perspective into the development of Chinese society.

Yu Hong was born in the year when the Cultural Revolution began. Rather than inflict irreparable damage on the generation, the period provided them with a real sense of growing up with their country as it thrived as a modern state. The older generation of artists before Yu were heavily influenced by the Russian and Soviet realist traditions of the fifties and sixties, as well as “Scar Art” and “Rustic Realism”, becoming a heavily critical younger and more educated generation. In the face of this, “Yu Hong, and other artists who emerged at this time, converted the tremendous pressure they were under into tremendous advantage. They had open minds and positive attitudes to meet and absorb the knowledge of modern art, and refused to simply pander to the rigorous academic training they were given, preferring instead to form their own unique styles.”¹ This also explains why the New Generation Art Movement’s exhibition in 1991 triggered such a strong reaction, with Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong guiding artists onto another path, one that was apart from Soviet-style realism; and rattled with avant-garde energy. This new path was one that confronted the relationship between art and reality, life, and the city, breathing new life into the Chinese art world of the nineties.

The most common figure that appears in Yu Hong’s works is that of the artist herself, which gives the pieces an obvious autobiographical nature. In her earliest Portrait series, Yu still used other females as vehicles through which to portray her own personal pursuits. But from 1999 onwards, Yu publicised this inward inspection in a much clearer manner. Beginning with that year, she began her series Witness to Growth. Using her own life as a blueprint for her work, she completed one piece per year, displaying publicly the intimate moments of her growth. While working on Witness to Growth, Yu Hong completed the six pieces that make up the Routine series from 2002 to 2003. Differing from the remembrance and nostalgia that is characteristic of Witness to Growth, this series depicts fragments of the artist’s own daily life, showing her interactions with other Chinese women at the time and painting herself in the market buying vegetables and fruit, and in the midst of undressing. Yu Hong mentioned, “All the six pieces are about my daily life. Like most people, my life is filled with incredible triviality. In fact life is simply like this.”²

In the 2003 piece Routine – Meet at the Party, Yu has painted herself along with three friends laughing at a party. Rather than using the solid blocks of colour common to the backgrounds of her works, this piece depicts a narrow space. The painted yellow walls, instead of acting as a flat, dull and hefty space, bustle with energy, and complement the characters of each of the four personas and their dynamism. Yu Hong’s comparatively stronger strokes, creates movement and energy, as if seizing the animated moment like a photograph. One can also discern the influences of the artist’s time spent at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, as the impact of training in realistic painting is very much present in this piece. However, Yu Hong’s work is a departure beyond that of any established mode—it is as if she has kept a memory of the style, but transformed it to suit her own agenda, utilising her feminine charm to illustrate the finer subtleties of life. This series is uniform in size—all of them life-sized—and even with such detail Yu Hong has altered them according to her own considerations, “As a painter, I have a strong sense of feminine perspective when I am creating works of art. I observe the world from a woman’s point of view—women seem to emphasise their understanding and experience of life, and do not simply produce political symbols. Real people are like this, society is like this. And to create a painting that is life-sized is the easiest manner to engage in a dialogue with society.”³

When this series was exhibited in New York in 2003, Yu Hong paired each piece with an article cut-out from a magazine or newspaper, saying, “These articles are all about how the common Chinese spend money. The government is vigorously developing a moderately prosperous society, and it is within this well-off society that I discovered the interesting interactions between Chinese people and their consumption patterns.”⁴ For example, hanging next to Routine - Meet at the Party at the time was a map from the Beijing Youth Daily, detailing English learning classes in Beijing, including location, courses and prices. While Yu’s perspective is undeniably feminine, she does not limit herself to her own comfort zone. The creation of this series demonstrates the depth of her thinking, which is far beyond that of her experiences. In creating the work, she trespasses the simple confines of personal life, rather, she shows the parallels between her own livelihood and the social development of China at the time. Because of this, when one looks at Yu Hong’s Routine series, one must remember that, aside from being a glimpse into the artist’s life, it is also a pivotal chronicle of contemporary Chinese life.

1 Yi Ying, “Interpreting Yu Hong”, Guangxi Normal University Press, 1998

2 Britta Erickson, “Poetry of Everyday Existence”, A Woman’s Life: The Art of Yu Hong, USA: Goedhuis Contemporary, 2003

3 Jérôme Sans, “Reactivating My History: Interview with Yu Hong”,Yu Hong: Golden Horizon, Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Chubanshe, 2010

4 Refer to 2