Yu Hong

Yu Hong (; born 1966) is a Chinese contemporary artist. Her works characteristically portray the female perspectives in all stages of life and the relationship between the individual and the rapid social changes taking place in China. She works primarily in oil paint but also in pastels, fabric dye on canvas, silk and resin. Yu Hong is "routinely named amongst China’s leading female artists". Her work is celebrated for its intimacy, honesty and tactility.

Life Yu Hong was born in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province in 1966 and lives and works in Beijing and New York. In 1988 she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where she received a thorough training in the techniques of figural realism. Early in her career, her paintings combined realistic portraits with surreal environments and colors. However, as she progressed, her focus on surrealism eventually dissipated. Instead, she focused more on her skills of observation and became very sensitive to facial expressions and body posture. She married fellow Chinese contemporary artist Liu Xiaodong and became a mother not long after.

In 1996, Hong completed her postgraduate studies at the Central Arts Institute of Beijing.

Work Hong’s subjects are predominately women. In the history of Chinese art, women were often depicted engaged in everyday activities created by men who overlaid that subject with symbolic ramifications For her 29th year/painting, she painted two portraits; in one, she is pregnant and in the next she has given birth.

She In 2003, Hong embarked on a new visual journey with her series ‘She’. According to Hong, she “knew all these women so [she] went to their place – where they live, where they work and I painted what I saw in their life.” and signature painterly manner.

Golden Horizon/Sky (The Gold Series) Hong and her husband Liu Xiaodong are often compared as having similar approaches to their work and as Liu’s work has grown more famous, Hong’s work took a slight backseat to his. However, in recent years she has begun to explore different approaches to her work, distinguishing herself from the work of her husband without abandoning her usual subject matter. Leading Chinese artists came to Boston to study the Museum of Fine Arts vast collection of Chinese Art and were prompted to create new works in response to those they saw. The works they created were juxtaposed against the works they studied. It was a way to add modern commentary to a long-standing Chinese tradition. ‘Romance of Spring’ was Hong’s response to the iconic masterpiece: ‘Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk’. She stepped outside her usual comfort zone – oil on canvas – and worked with thinly mixed acrylics on silk instead. The result yielded the same look and feel of traditional brush and ink. ‘Romance of Spring’ fit in nicely with the Gold series, which she was also working on at the time, because the approach is the same, and the silk is gold.

The paintings were hung on the ceiling and resonated with the subject of court ladies while simultaneously drawing attention to the materiality of the painting. Shown at the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, these were large-scale works that incorporated characters, events and landscapes from ancient Chinese fables into a traditional Chinese garden. Hong used her tool of the trade, to connect the stories and does so by including news from recent years, to integrate (and juxtapose) the ancient against the contemporary. This results in the creation of a “Parallel World” – there are strange things in a derelict but oddly vivid colored garden and is a space that contradicts itself by design.

As a student, Hong was interested in the Surrealist movement but abandoned it for authentic figure painting. With ‘Garden of Dreams’ her previous interest in Surrealism has been reawakened and each piece has tinges of the style – common is her use of vivid color and expressive painterly stroke. In some of the pieces, like ‘A Garden of Dreams’, we can see influences of painters such as Hieronymus Bosch and his ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’. Previous work like ‘Golden Sky’ and ‘Romance of Spring’ most likely prompted Hong to create these paintings with the same amount of research and thought.

‘Garden of Dreams’ is a response to the messy un-relatedness of daily life and how they can influence the person who is experiencing them. “I want to put these diverse, disordered, chaotic elements together, which is my response or feeling of this real society,” said Hong. Fresh Ink: Ten Takes on Chinese Tradition, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA, 2010; In and Out of Time – Yu Hong, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China, 2009; Yu Hong: Witness to Growth, Eslite Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan, 2007; Yu Hong, Loft Gallery, Paris, France, 2006; A Woman’s Life, The Art of Yu Hong, Halsey Gallery, College of Charleston, SC, USA, 2003; Yu Hong: Witness To Growth, Museum of Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, Wuhan, China, 2003; Yu Hong & Liu Xiaodong : Recent Paintings, OIPA East Village, New York, NY, USA, 1994; Yu Hong’s Painting, Gallery of Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, China, 1990; The World of Woman Artists, CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, China, 1990; Nude Painting Exhibition, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China, 1988; and The First Oil Painting Exhibition of China, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 1986.

Public collections Hong's work is included in several public collections, including Singapore Art Museum, SIngapore; Dong Yu Art Museum, Shenyang, China; Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Upriver Art Museum, Chengdu, China; China Art Gallery, China; and Ludwig Gallery, Germany.