“Yu Hong: Garden of Dreams” presented 19 new paintings created by the artist over the last two years as well as three glass sculpture works that were made in the Czech Republic. The exhibition continued the viewing and understanding of the world in multiple dimensions, which were examined in her previous exhibition “Yu Hong: Parallel World” (Suzhou Museum, 2015). Together with Yu Hong’s exquisite, realistic style, the juxtaposition of landscapes and characters from different time and space created scenes that are crossing the ancient and modern time, the East and the West, dreams, and reality. “Garden of Dreams” can be considered as both a real and creative space. The former refers to a deserted park that the artist encountered and inspired her to create the same-titled painting “Garden of Dreams,” from which this exhibition is named after. While the imaginative space contains two parts: one is the relationship between the artworks and the exhibition space, which has long been emphasized by Yu Hong in her creations. The implicit meaning of the word “garden” adopted the thoughts of the space and works in her previous exhibition “Yu Hong: Parallel World,” making the spirit of the places that reflected in the painting fits into the contemporary space of the CAFA Art Museum. The other implication of “Garden of Dreams” is to create an unrestricted spiritual space, encompassing all the peaceful and beautiful, absurd and ridiculous, stupid and ignorant things that experienced by the figures in the painting. The world represented by “Gardens of Dreams” reflected Yu Hong’s exploration into humanity. The figures in the painting are depicted extraordinarily lifelike, sometimes they were shown as nude, as the artist abandoned to depict clothes or symbols in the case to link the figures to any historical period. She stripped away the individual variation from human figures to get an in-depth understanding of humanity, meanwhile projecting them into the historical and cultural environment that are repeatedly hovering in her mind. For example, she was inspired by ancient Chinese fables such as “The blind men and the elephant (盲人摸象)”, “Marking the raft to find the drowned sword (刻舟求剑)”, “Monkey fishing the moon in the water (猴子捞月)” and “A hundred playing children (百子图)”. In work “Don’t miss the best time (不负春光),” she gained inspiration from the paintings of Henri Rousseau and depicted a fantastic, dreamlike scene in which the two main female figures turn out to be current internet celebrities. While the work “Even Higher, Even Further (百尺竿头)” constructed a parallel world in which the reality and hyperreality coexist without contradiction. The whole work used a telephone pole to connect the three pictures, with three groups of different people occupying a position on the different heights of the telephone pole, presenting the construction and state of surrealism in realistic depictions. In work “Snapshot (快照),” Yu Hong chose animals as main subjects for the first time and made its mannerism and temperament looks like a human who is posing for pictures and taking snapshots. She further peeled away the form of a human, while pressing it closer to “Garden of Dreams”.
26 years had passed from the time when Yu Hong attended her first group exhibition at the CAFA Art Museum. This time, she returned to the museum to hold a solo exhibition after experiencing several transformations in her way of thinking. Her art also entered into a more mature stage. In the early 1990s, the Political Pop art and Cynical Realism were widely practiced by Chinese contemporary artists, but Yu Hong paid more attention to the lives and personal experiences of the younger generation, with various personalities against a monochromatic historical context, leading her to be regarded as one of the “New Generation Artists.” In 1999, Yu Hong started to create “Witness to Growth” series, in which she juxtaposed oil paintings of self-portrait and the real historical backgrounds into one scene, which marked her transformation from a preliminary explorer to one who keeps pace with the present. Then her creation reached a very strong epic level in the “Gold” series (2008-2011), as the pictures further demonstrated the artist’s research on traditional Chinese paintings, Dunhuang, the Kizl Thousand Buddha Caves and traditional Western paintings, outlining a more wide-reaching and profound time scale and space. In “Yu Hong: Wondering Clouds” (Long March Space, 2013), Yu Hong turned her focal point from the external form of an individual to their internalemotional states and situations. In “Yu Hong: Parallel World” (Suzhou Museum, 2015), by placing landscapes and figures from reality into surrealist realms, she gradually expanded the range of her artistic creations while painstakingly experimented artistic practices to observe the nature of individuals and groups.
Alongside the exhibition, a catalog of the same title of CAFA Annual Fine Arts Nomination Exhibition 2016 – Yu Hong: Garden of Dreamsis published, edited by Fan Di’an. The catalog includes a foreword written by Mr. Fan, and several exhibition reviews separately by Wang Huangsheng, the director of CAFA Art Museum; Lu Mingjun, the young scholar of art history; He Guiyan, the critic, curator and professor of Sichuan Fines Arts Institute; Sheng Weizhen, the associate editor of the Art Magazine. The catalog also includes an interview made by the curator Karen Smith. In addition, image reproductions of twenty-two paintings from the exhibition are all included in the catalog.
“Yu Hong: Garden of Dreams” presented 19 new paintings created by the artist over the last two years as well as three glass sculpture works that were made in the Czech Republic. The exhibition continued the viewing and understanding of the world in multiple dimensions, which were examined in her previous exhibition “Yu Hong: Parallel World” (Suzhou Museum, 2015). Together with Yu Hong’s exquisite, realistic style, the juxtaposition of landscapes and characters from different time and space created scenes that are crossing the ancient and modern time, the East and the West, dreams, and reality. “Garden of Dreams” can be considered as both a real and creative space. The former refers to a deserted park that the artist encountered and inspired her to create the same-titled painting “Garden of Dreams,” from which this exhibition is named after. While the imaginative space contains two parts: one is the relationship between the artworks and the exhibition space, which has long been emphasized by Yu Hong in her creations. The implicit meaning of the word “garden” adopted the thoughts of the space and works in her previous exhibition “Yu Hong: Parallel World,” making the spirit of the places that reflected in the painting fits into the contemporary space of the CAFA Art Museum. The other implication of “Garden of Dreams” is to create an unrestricted spiritual space, encompassing all the peaceful and beautiful, absurd and ridiculous, stupid and ignorant things that experienced by the figures in the painting. The world represented by “Gardens of Dreams” reflected Yu Hong’s exploration into humanity. The figures in the painting are depicted extraordinarily lifelike, sometimes they were shown as nude, as the artist abandoned to depict clothes or symbols in the case to link the figures to any historical period. She stripped away the individual variation from human figures to get an in-depth understanding of humanity, meanwhile projecting them into the historical and cultural environment that are repeatedly hovering in her mind. For example, she was inspired by ancient Chinese fables such as “The blind men and the elephant (盲人摸象)”, “Marking the raft to find the drowned sword (刻舟求剑)”, “Monkey fishing the moon in the water (猴子捞月)” and “A hundred playing children (百子图)”. In work “Don’t miss the best time (不负春光),” she gained inspiration from the paintings of Henri Rousseau and depicted a fantastic, dreamlike scene in which the two main female figures turn out to be current internet celebrities. While the work “Even Higher, Even Further (百尺竿头)” constructed a parallel world in which the reality and hyperreality coexist without contradiction. The whole work used a telephone pole to connect the three pictures, with three groups of different people occupying a position on the different heights of the telephone pole, presenting the construction and state of surrealism in realistic depictions. In work “Snapshot (快照),” Yu Hong chose animals as main subjects for the first time and made its mannerism and temperament looks like a human who is posing for pictures and taking snapshots. She further peeled away the form of a human, while pressing it closer to “Garden of Dreams”.
26 years had passed from the time when Yu Hong attended her first group exhibition at the CAFA Art Museum. This time, she returned to the museum to hold a solo exhibition after experiencing several transformations in her way of thinking. Her art also entered into a more mature stage. In the early 1990s, the Political Pop art and Cynical Realism were widely practiced by Chinese contemporary artists, but Yu Hong paid more attention to the lives and personal experiences of the younger generation, with various personalities against a monochromatic historical context, leading her to be regarded as one of the “New Generation Artists.” In 1999, Yu Hong started to create “Witness to Growth” series, in which she juxtaposed oil paintings of self-portrait and the real historical backgrounds into one scene, which marked her transformation from a preliminary explorer to one who keeps pace with the present. Then her creation reached a very strong epic level in the “Gold” series (2008-2011), as the pictures further demonstrated the artist’s research on traditional Chinese paintings, Dunhuang, the Kizl Thousand Buddha Caves and traditional Western paintings, outlining a more wide-reaching and profound time scale and space. In “Yu Hong: Wondering Clouds” (Long March Space, 2013), Yu Hong turned her focal point from the external form of an individual to their internalemotional states and situations. In “Yu Hong: Parallel World” (Suzhou Museum, 2015), by placing landscapes and figures from reality into surrealist realms, she gradually expanded the range of her artistic creations while painstakingly experimented artistic practices to observe the nature of individuals and groups.
Alongside the exhibition, a catalog of the same title of CAFA Annual Fine Arts Nomination Exhibition 2016 – Yu Hong: Garden of Dreamsis published, edited by Fan Di’an. The catalog includes a foreword written by Mr. Fan, and several exhibition reviews separately by Wang Huangsheng, the director of CAFA Art Museum; Lu Mingjun, the young scholar of art history; He Guiyan, the critic, curator and professor of Sichuan Fines Arts Institute; Sheng Weizhen, the associate editor of the Art Magazine. The catalog also includes an interview made by the curator Karen Smith. In addition, image reproductions of twenty-two paintings from the exhibition are all included in the catalog.
