Artist Yu Hong: Her Paintings Record One Woman Growing Up, and a Society Changing Around Her

For 30 years, Yu Hong's canvases have refracted the shifting conditions of her time.

A baby is born in a modern maternity ward. A girl in an age of radicalism watches the activity outside her window. A middle-aged woman in Ming-dynasty clothes unwinds the cloth binding her feet. In an age of primitive civilization, a crowd gathers around an altar, heads bowed in worship. At first glance the stories have nothing to do with one another; what links them is the immersion that virtual reality (VR) makes possible, which keeps the viewer inside the story even after the headset comes off.

Look closer and the stories trace the stages of one woman's life — the people and things around her falling away behind her as time passes.

The artist Yu Hong made this VR work, She Once Came Here, in 2017. After more than two years of preparation, it is now on view at the Long Museum in Shanghai alongside other pieces from her 30-year career. Visitors will have little trouble spotting the question that has occupied Yu Hong all along: how do you depict an era, and how do you depict human nature?

The usual answer reaches for blunt political symbols, or for iconic figures that reflect or satirize collective experience. Yu Hong takes a smaller, more personal view. The women who grow older across her paintings — herself among them — lead private lives that keep refracting the changing conditions of their times.

"It's always hard for an individual to transcend their era," Yu Hong told QDaily. "The place you live in, the time you live in, the whole culture you're part of — it's hard to get beyond any of that. Of course, some people do 'jump out.' But even jumping out requires the era to give you that chance."

The relationship between Yu Hong's figures and their era isn't hard to read. In Witness to Growth, the series on show here, she records the milestones of her own life and hangs beside each painting, on its left, an image of that year's "major social event," clipped from a newspaper or magazine. Next to the painting Yu Hong at 28, Pregnant, 1994, for instance, hangs a photocopied page: "People's Daily, issue 1, 1994, page 25 — The Million-Person Resettlement for the Three Gorges on the Yangtze."

Viewers watch two kinds of growth at once, and feel the weight and complexity of one person's fate in the pull between the large view and the small one: at times she seems to stand outside events, yet in the end she can never step clear of them.

Yu Hong was born in Xi'an in 1966, grew up in Beijing and studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. After reform and opening began, she became one of the Chinese contemporary artists the world took notice of. Her own trajectory has landed on nearly every stressed beat in the history of Chinese society and Chinese contemporary art: the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, the death of Chairman Mao, the 1989 China Avant-Garde exhibition, the wave of artists leaving for the United States, the boom in the contemporary art market.

That background gives her a natural advantage in interpreting her own work. In the VR piece Half a Century, she added a soundtrack to the painting of the same name on show beside it: the funeral music of 1976, the "decadent" 1980s hit Sweet as Honey, Cui Jian's Nothing to My Name, the spring breeze of the opening-up years — a rush of period atmosphere straight in the face.

Besides this plain juxtaposition of the individual and the era, Yu Hong has in recent years also drawn on religious imagery, which makes up the exhibition's first chapter. These canvases, several meters tall, are not religious paintings in the traditional sense; they fuse religious subject matter with secular figures. Yugong Still Moves the Mountains, 5 by 9 meters, takes its title from a Chinese fable and packs the frame with people from every social class, while conveying the despair of Sisyphus and his boulder. New Century parodies Michelangelo's Creation and offers a reading of the digital age.

As Yu Hong sees it, the "religiousness" of these works only helps people consider life from a wider angle — to consider the "most fundamental questions." The tired figures who bow their heads or turn their backs on the viewer reflect the anxiety the contemporary world lays on the individual.

Seen another way, these grander elements also mark a shift in her practice: she has grown more concerned with the world, with things happening in far-off places, and more like an "international artist."

Witness to Growth now runs through 2018. The historical image she chose for that year is the standoff between Angela Merkel and Donald Trump at the G7 summit — a highly dramatic piece of news photography. Asked which recent news story stayed with her, she names "ISIS loses its last stronghold."

In 1993, Yu Hong married the contemporary artist Liu Xiaodong at a wedding in New York. Their work was recognized by the international collecting market long ago. They no longer need to prove their place in art history; they face a different test — whether they can resist the pull of the symbols and methods they have rehearsed again and again, the ones the market reliably likes.

"VR" is undoubtedly one of the selling points of Yu Hong's Shanghai solo show, but the great bulk of the exhibition is flat painting. She has, in fact, spent more than 30 years on flat painting — she teaches in the Oil Painting Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts — and in its most figurative form. Compared with 30 years ago, this medium and this style are no longer mainstream in the contemporary art market, and critics sometimes mock them as "outdated," even though art, in theory, should not be so squeamish about being old.

Yu Hong does not seem especially worried about painting's decline. Her answer to that question, like her answers to many others, comes back to personal experience. She does not much like the word "persist" for what she does; she would rather say that painting "still has so many possibilities, there are still new things to paint, and it's fun."

Rather than formal shocks or philosophical inspiration, what Yu Hong gives the viewer is a fine-grained personal expression and a plain telling of history. She has indeed made herself the protagonist of her pictures — and made that protagonist as ordinary as the person looking at her.

QDaily also spoke with Yu Hong about the following.

Q: QDaily Y: Yu Hong

Q: The first chapter of the exhibition paints many religious stories. Was there one that moved you in particular?

Y: Something like the "Ladder to Heaven" I find quite interesting. The first time I saw it, it was only a small black-and-white picture in an art book, but it moved me: the ladder runs from the ground up to heaven, and on that side there seems to be sun, and light, and God receiving people, while below there are all kinds of demons and monsters, and many of the people climbing the ladder in search of enlightenment get pulled down by little demons, fall into hell and are devoured. In a way it's a metaphor for life: everyone walks along a very narrow ladder, and their choices are hemmed in on every side. I found it especially interesting at the time, and painted that ladder picture.

Q: In the first chapter, many of the figures look worn out — turned away from the viewer, or with their heads down — as if under enormous pressure from the world around them?

Y: Right, the world itself is changing fast; all kinds of political and economic forces are contending with each other and holding each other in check. The present we live in especially is an important period of transition, so it's a state of uncertainty that leaves individuals unsettled and anxious. The people I paint are, for the most part, caught in a state of everyday life, not placed there frontally, standing or seated — because what I paint isn't the traditional portrait, it's a life situation.

Q: One work depicts the shots the artist Xiao Lu fired at the 1989 China Avant-Garde exhibition. That image has also been spray-painted on the gallery wall. What does it mean to you? (Note: In February 1989, China's first exhibition of modern art was held in Beijing. The young artist Xiao Lu fired two shots at her own installation, throwing the venue into chaos. Xiao Lu was detained for five days, and the exhibition was shut down soon afterward. It is a landmark event in the history of Chinese contemporary art.)

Y: To me, Xiao Lu is simply a classmate — a good friend, someone I grew up with at the Central Academy's affiliated high school, a close and easy friend. Her work is certainly intense. Art history may read that shot one way; but what I can grasp better is the confusion and inner conflict she went through while firing it. I understand it from a more personal angle, rather than placing it in some grand historical or global framework.

Xiao Lu's own character is extremely strong; she is capable of doing what most people would see as fairly extreme. At that particular moment, circumstances happened to converge on that point, and she probably just erupted. Of course, interpretation is always a question for art history — we read it one way now, and in 10, 20 or 50 years it may be read differently. But I'd rather look at it from the individual's point of view.

Q: You took part in the 1989 China Avant-Garde exhibition yourself, and this year marks exactly 30 years since then. From what you've seen, how have the conditions and the atmosphere for making art changed?

Y: The change has been enormous. Before the 1980s, China was fairly closed off. After the '80s it opened up, all kinds of ideas came flooding in, and young people had a very strong drive to push back and to express themselves. They may not have really understood the Western formal languages they were picking up — they just felt these things were useful, so they took them and used them to express themselves, and that produced a powerful explosive force.

Now information in the world is more symmetrical; what we see no longer comes with that much distance or time lag, and young people get more information, and fuller information. But I think that precisely because society has developed and is relatively calmer, that explosive force isn't as strong as it was. Art today is probably more varied and more refined, though — back then it really was crude, but it was crude with explosive force behind it.

Q: You now work as someone the international art world knows well. Along with everything you've been through in the past 30 years, has that changed your creative mindset or the questions you focus on?

Y: It has. What hasn't changed is that my main thread is still realist painting, flat painting. As for what has changed: in the '80s and '90s I was living inside that same atmosphere, and my work expressed more the condition of individuals in the small area around me. Now, with this exhibition at the Long Museum, for instance, beyond its sheer scale it also takes in more concerns. Partly that's because with age and experience I've formed more judgments about the world; partly it's because information is richer now, so I can care not only about the individual, not only about one small region — Beijing, China — but also about the larger fate of humanity.

Q: You often mention the idea of a work's "field." Could you explain how you understand it?

Y: I can't give it an academic definition — it's more something I grasp through my own visual experience.

For example, when I was a student and went to the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, I had a very strong feeling there. The desert is usually flooded with sunlight, dazzling, but the moment you step into a cave it turns into a completely dark space. You really can't see anything, and you can only look with a flashlight — wherever you point it, that's what you see. Ancient people lit these places with oil lamps and candles, and that kind of light flickers by nature; it's not like today, where you switch on a lamp and the whole image is laid out in front of you. That way of looking is itself a religious ritual. Everyone knows the experience: you hold a candle or a lamp up to a painting and one point inside the pool of light becomes very strong; then you move the light somewhere else, to a painted sculpture, say, and what you just saw disappears at once.

What's especially interesting about that experience is that it has a drama to it, a bit like a stage: a light comes on here and you see this group of figures performing; the light here dims, a light comes on over there, and you see another group. It's through this shifting of light that the viewer's gaze is guided and drawn into the story.

At its core, at its most primal, art is always the same thing: it puts the viewer inside the experience, lets them feel some kind of atmosphere, makes them part of that atmosphere. You might end up worshipping, or dancing, or doing something else — becoming part of it. That's one origin point of art. Art today has been sorted into far too many categories: painting is painting, sculpture is sculpture, and to watch a film you have to go to a cinema. I think that at its origin art doesn't separate painting from theater, sculpture, dance. It's all one thing.

I've painted a lot of ceiling paintings — flat works on a gold ground, on subjects tied to religion or to classical tradition. Put on a ceiling, they create an atmosphere, and that too is a return to that older way of looking. In this show the main hall holds a few fairly large paintings; you can't make the whole space fully enclosed, but because the architecture itself has the ritual feeling of a cave, and the paintings are large, there's a sense of the viewer being wrapped inside them.

Q: Many people describe you as a traditional academic artist. At the Central Academy you first became known for painting David, you were influenced by Soviet realism, and today you still hold to flat painting as your basic form — even the VR work has painting underneath it. But this kind of realist easel work seems to show up less and less at contemporary art exhibitions. How do you see that trend?

Y: Choices today are more and more varied — the mediums have changed a great deal, and so has what interests viewers. But that doesn't affect painting's reason for existing, because I think painting is basic to human nature. Give a child a sheet of paper and a pen and they will draw a little figure, a house. No training needed; they're born knowing how. So people's interest in painting is a basic psychological need.

A lot of people say painting is dead, painting has disappeared — that's simply not worth thinking about. Of course painting is no longer mainstream, the way traditional Chinese literati painting or (Western) religious painting once was. Now there are more mediums, forms made of sound and light and electronics, and painting probably isn't what catches the eye most. But that's fine, because every medium goes through a process of turning from new to old. A lot of video and new-media work, for instance — you watch it once and that's enough, you're not going to watch it your whole life — but a painting hangs there and can take your gaze whenever you look at it. It's only that not everyone who studies art is suited to, or good at, every field.

Why do I persist? I'm not persisting. The moment someone says they're persisting at something, it usually means they're about to give up. I've kept doing this because I find it interesting; there are still so many possibilities in it, there are still new things I can paint, and it's fun. If I had to tell myself I'm persisting today and persisting tomorrow, I'd last a few days and then give up.

Q: Describe how the present feels to you in a few words.

Y: Fast change, fragmentation, uncertainty — that's about it.

Exhibition information:

Yu Hong: The Saha Realm

Dates: March 9 – May 5, 2019

Venue: Long Museum (West Bund), Shanghai

Curator: Jérôme Sans

Admission: 50 yuan per person

Cover image courtesy of the Long Museum. Photo by Su Hang.