Yu Hong

Yu Hong (Hong Yu, 喻红) (born 1966) is a Chinese contemporary artist. Her works characteristically portray the perspectives of females in all stages of life and the relationship between the individual and the rapid social change taking place in China. She works primarily in oil paint but dabbles 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.

Yu Hong was born in 1966 in the Shaanxi Province of China and received her first degree from the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (1984–88) in Beijing. There she received a thorough training in the techniques of figural realism. In the beginning, her paintings combined extremely 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 major Chinese contemporary artist Liu Xiaodong in the summer of 1993 and became a mother not long after.

In 1995, Hong received an MFA in Oil Painting from the Central Arts Institute of Beijing. In addition, she and a small group of colleagues became known as the “New Generation” artists, known for their highly personal figurative works.

Hong now holds tenure as a professor of Oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing.

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 – the female point of view was not a viable mode of creation. Hong’s work is different because she honors the female (and by extension, the individual) in all phases of life, from childhood to maturity. She does not swathe her images with extreme symbolism or sentimentality. Her subjects usually consist of herself, her friends, family and her daughter, Liu Wa. Her method of painting is immensely personal and has been criticized as seemingly mundane, but she highlights the beauty in the intricacies of daily life, friendship, love and the impact of the environment on people. 

In 2000, Hong began to work on ‘Witness to Growth’; a series of paintings created for each year of her life. Each painting is a one-meter square canvas with an image of herself based on the photograph taken at the time. She does not pay special attention to keeping a similar image; instead, some of the paintings seemed posed while others are spontaneous. Hong uses compositions and colors to capture important ideas or experiences/moods to commemorate that time. For her 29th year/painting, she painted two portraits; in one, she is pregnant and in the next she has given birth. From there, Hong began to paint her young daughter in attempts to chronicle her life as well. Upon exhibiting ‘Witness to Growth’ for the first time, Hong placed a newspaper or magazine article to complement each image. ‘Witness to Growth’ is a ubiquitous series of works because it is a self-examination of the artist and her surroundings. By linking herself to events that happened around her or around the world, Hong puts herself and her life on critical display. The juxtaposition of social and political events against personal moments creates a tension and highlights the disparity between inner and outer events.

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Wikipedia