Yu Hong

Beijing-based artist Yu Hong (born 1966) is well known for her large-scale paintings on canvas, silk and sheets of resin, which marry older styles and idioms—from Chinese cave painting to Italian Renaissance frescoes—with imagery from contemporary life in China. Her youthful men and women are frequently depicted as if in mid-air, pitched against luscious monochrome backdrops (sometimes rendered in gold leaf). A prominent figure among those Chinese artists of the 1980s who eschewed the dominant Socialist Realism to explore more psychological terrain, Yu Hong has maintained a commitment to figuration, using its narrative possibilities to explore themes of gender, cultural conditioning, and, increasingly, the visual language of spirituality. Published on the occasion of Yu Hong’s major 2011 exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum, Golden Horizon brings together the artist’s recent bodies of work including her newest series of paintings made specifically for this show.

In her new series Golden Sky, acclaimed painter Yu Hong reanimates history by combining classical and religious composition with scenes from secular life. Inspired by the Buddhist cave paintings of Dunhuang and Kizil, classical western art and her own reading, the artist populates her large canvases with life-size men, women and children going about their daily lives against the backdrop of a golden sky.