Yu Hong’s moment in the Western market has finally arrived – The Art Newspaper
23 October 2024
Yu Hong’s art has always been grounded in the world around her. With Bible-sized themes and a social realist’s eye, the painter has limned an evolving psychological portrait of post-reform China across the last three decades and counting, cementing her status as one of the country’s most accomplished artists in the process. But while preparing to unveil a new and surprisingly introspective body of work at Lisson Gallery in London, the 58-year-old was feeling at sea.
Islands of the Mind (until 9 November), like her 2023 presentation at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Georgia, features a suite of huge, allegorical paintings informed by masterpieces of art history. That earlier show saw the artist riffing on multiple forebears, including Théodore Géricault, El Greco and Edvard Munch, but this time around the influence on her new works is confined to one source: the Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin’s Island of the Dead (several versions, 1880-1901), an eerie image originally commissioned to memorialise the late husband of a patron, who would “be able to dream [herself] into the world of dark shadows” through it, the artist wrote to her.
“When I saw Böcklin’s work, I knew I would paint islands,” Yu Hong, who splits her time between New York and Beijing (and is referred to in all contexts by her full name), says of an encounter with the painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2023. In Böcklin’s cryptic depiction of a shrouded boatman ferrying a lone casket toward an islet inset with ruins, she recognised something unexpected: a metaphor for the fractured human psyche in a post-pandemic world. One of the new paintings, Island of Life (2024), shows a pair of water-locked lovers lounging amid swans, cranes and an Edenic apple tree; another, Metropolis Island (2024), depicts a trio of city kids climbing a staircase to an ominous orange sky above. “Everybody has an island in their heart,” the artist says.
Continue reading in The Art Newspaper here.
