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March 23, 2019

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Power of memory in a world to be endured

WHEN a woman gets to 50, beauty and allure are often thought to drift away. Unable to accept this possibility, some are tortured. Some, more accepting, find a source of emotional release. Artist Yu Hong pours all her understanding of human nature into her art.

As one of China’s most celebrated female artists, her solo exhibition “The World of Saha,” curated by Jerome Sans, is currently on display at the Long Museum West Bund.

More than a retrospective, this exhibition is described as an “introspective” into her unique and wide-ranging vocabulary.

“The World of Saha” is a Buddhist expression meaning the world to be endured. Those who suffer are to be considered prisoners of their own personal desires.

According to Indian cosmology, the challenges of all living beings in current lives are determined by the acts in previous lives, which brought about their rebirth.

Slim and elegant in a well-tailored suit, with her signature bobbed hair style, Yu believes that, in the eyes of many, she will always belong to the group of people “specially kissed by God.”

Born in Xi’an in 1966, she began studying oil painting at the high school affiliated to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing at the age of 14 and went on to obtain a postgraduate degree from the academy in 1996. She married Liu Xiaodong, a classmate and acknowledged as one of China’s most talented artists.

In one sense, on the outside, Yu truly did lead a comfortable life. But everyone’s inner-side is akin to a personal universe. The struggle and pain deep in her soul could only be reflected through her art.

Stepping into the exhibition hall, visitors are immediately drawn to three gigantic canvases on the wall. The triptych “Heaven on Earth” (2018) depicts the ascent from the abyss of a glacier to a cloudy sky by a group of naked men and women frozen in enigmatic poses as if in search of something. The power and energy radiating from the canvas could be difficult to link to somewhat frail artist standing beside them.

“I have prepared nearly two years for this exhibition,” Yu said. “Perhaps I will never hold a large-scale exhibition again.”

The exhibition maps her world as a kind of visual opera in four acts: “Time of Rebirth,” her lifelong commitment to a series of “Portraits,” “Half-Hundred Mirrors” and “Witness to Growth.”

Yu reconstructs personal and socio-historical memories through photography and painting, tracing the history of China’s last 30 years.

“Time is the direct evidence, and changes everything,” she said.

Her creative inspiration is grounded in her personal life and everyday surroundings, building a world that fuses different perceptions of time, memories and the evolution of emotional states related to her inner world. She tries to explore women’s everyday lives in China’s changing social, political and cultural debates.

“I prefer not to be labelled as a feminist artist. Family life is not the only focus for female artists. What I am interested in is the individual, or to be exact, the relationship between an ordinary person and the outside world,” she said.

Yu often uses existing images as her starting point, taking photographs and her own point of view to create compositions, rearranging them into new combinations.

“Witness to Growth” is her way to highlight the significance of life.

For example, using her own life and the birth of her daughter, Liu Wa, in 1994 as a narrative foundation, Yu has made the ongoing series a record of her life by drawing upon photos from news events in her world.

She illustrates the inherent contingencies of official records and personal experiences by pairing a journalistic photograph culled from official Chinese media outlets, such as the People’s Daily and China Pictorial, with a painting of herself and of her daughter in the same year as the photograph was taken.

““From 1994 when I gave birth to my daughter to 1999, I seldom painted,” she recalled. “Then I started to look back. I wanted to go beyond the autobiography as the comparison between the two generations. What I was trying to infuse was the ups and downs of society.”

Originally trained in the Social Realist style, indebted to traditions of European Realism, Yu borrows widely from Western painting traditions, from Medieval Gothic Christian painting to Renaissance frescoes.

Apart from pursuing the limits of canvas, the artist also actively involves the contemporary digital world.

For example, Chapter 3 “Half-Hundred Mirrors” uses virtual reality to show the birth and growth of a group of kids from childhood to maturity.

“It is like a moving visual record of a collective memory of our generation,” said Xu Ying, a 50-year-old visitor.

“When wearing the VR glasses, I felt that suddenly I was back in a bygone era. Sometimes the background scene or sounds are familiar yet have already faded in my memory.

“I was especially touched when the girl turns 50 and she is holding a mirror in her hands. Guess what, I found my face in that mirror, as if I were directly gazing into myself.”

Suspended between reality and fiction, Yu’s work stirs something deep in the hearts of the viewers.

“Maybe I am already aware that many things in life are inevitable. As a result, I no longer feel pessimistic,” Yu said.

“The World of Saha” is also a world of human resilience as an act of resistance, an urge to live in spite of adversity, by surpassing the major wounds of life.




 

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