Yu Hong

signed in Pinyin and dated 2005; titled and signed in Chinese and dated 2005 on the reverse

In the View, Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing, pp. 78-79

Painting: Generally in good condition. Minor dirt along the upper edges. The print: There is sticky residue along the edges possibly from previous framing. Minor abrasions along the edge. Two miniscule punctures at the bottom part of the print.
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Born during the first year of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) to an artistic family, Yu Hong was identified as artistically talented when she was a small child. Given her circumstances, it was almost inevitable that she should become a figure painter. The government mandated that all art serve the people: this translated to the primacy of instructive or inspirational figure painting, rendered in the socialist realist manner. Yu Hong's mother was a painter working in this mode, and Yu Hong's childhood drawings reveal her burgeoning talent as she infused patriotic images with the color and movement that engender emotional response. Later, as a student in the extremely selective Oil Painting Department of the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Yu Hong honed her technical skills and began developing the loose, sometimes edgy style for which she is known. Upon graduation from the master's program in 1995, she elected to stay on as a teacher.

In the later 1980s and the 1990s Yu Hong, like many other young Chinese artists, sought to forge a new path for art. Following the end of the Cultural Revolution they were freed from the burden to create propagandistic art, and increasingly aware of the rich artistic developments in the West. In such a climate, anything seemed possible. While many gifted figure painters turned to newly imported, more "modern," media such as video or installation art, a core group of Beijing figurative painters of Yu Hong's generation effected a ground shift in the genre: they became known as the New Generation group of figurative painters. Yu Hong and her husband, Liu Xiaodong, were major protagonists of the movement, turning core tenets of socialist realism on their head. Most essential was a change of subject: while socialist realism glorifies the heroic, idealized figure and vilifies traitors to the Communist cause, the New Generation painters depicted their peers - young artists and intellectuals establishing a new urban culture. And instead of the high drama characterizing socialist realist images, they favored the mundane, expressing nuances of everyday experience through facial expression and body posture.

From early in her career, Yu Hong has favored the subject of women, examining the details of their everyday lives. No-one had really done this before. Before the twentieth century most Chinese figure painters were men, and if women appeared in their works they played symbolic or supporting roles. Then, for much of the twentieth century women were represented as mannish types working in the support of the revolution. Indeed, gender aside, to focus on the individual as Yu Hong has done is a breath of fresh air.

In 1999 Yu Hong embarked on the first of several major painting series, Witness to Growth. This ongoing series comprises a painting representing each year of her life, based on a photograph taken during that year, and paired for exhibition with a concurrent news photograph. Next she began a parallel series focusing on her daughter's life. Turning outwards to consider women in roles both familiar and alien to her, in 2003 Yu Hong commenced work on the She series. Each impressively scaled (150 x 300 cm) painting in the series portrays a woman representing one facet of the unprecedented diversity of the contemporary Chinese female experience, and accompanying each painting is a personal portrait photograph chosen by the subject. So far Yu Hong has painted around twenty works in this series, including an artist, a real estate developer, an entrepreneur, a security guard, a professor (her mother), a retired worker (her mother-in-law), a writer, a gymnastics teacher, a student, a farmer, a musician, an unemployed woman, a restaurant owner, a Tibetan peasant and so on. While the painting expresses the artist's view of her subject, the photograph provides a fascinating counterpoint by asserting the subject's sense of self as we can surmise from the painting - and touching testimony to her trust in the artist.