Overview

Virtuosic, large-scale figurative paintings that capture contemporary anxieties in harsh relief Published to accompany a major site-specific installation in Venice, Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust offers an in-depth examination of the work of one of China’s foremost living artists, renowned internationally for her virtuosic large-scale figurative paintings. Yu Hong’s (born 1966) practice centers on humane depictions of contemporary life that are both deeply personal and astute in their observations of larger societal realities. Featuring beautiful installation photography of Venice’s Chiesetta della Misericordia, this book presents a new cycle of works painted on gold ground that depict the arc of human experience while referencing aspects of Buddhist narrative painting, Byzantine icons and the Italian Baroque. Through her lushly painted stories, she considers the radical changes pressed on humanity by the speed and totality of globalization, the existential climate emergency, diaspora and dispossession in many parts of the world, and the uneven histories of postcolonialism. Yu Hong’s subject is the precarity of meaning in the face of calamitous disruption.

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9781636811512

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…the Chinese painter Yu Hong, exhibiting in a small church in the city’s quieter north, whose 10-panel polyptych on thickly smeared gold grounds channels human life into a raw cycle of pain and glory.…but there is no ecstasy here, and no escape from the physical facts of flesh and paint. Yu is doing what we used to expect all art to do; she is showing us how to live. -- Jason Farago * The New York Times: Arts * The medieval former church in the Cannaregio district played a brief, albeit thrilling, part in the 1979 James Bond film Moonraker.…but paintings by the Chinese artist Yu Hong, in the shape of altarpieces, tondos and religious icons, will be filling the empty spots. The site-specific suite of works depict hands, feet and writhing bodies on gold backgrounds painted in the Socialist Realist style that the artist was trained in. -- Jose da Silva * The Art Newspaper * Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust' presents to a global audience the artist’s most spectacular Surrealist paintings and her philosophy on life and death. …Yu describes the church as highly appropriate in both style and size, saying: 'Condensed through the baptism of history, the space possesses a profound sense of time, which seamlessly integrates with the artworks, forming an organic whole.' -- Cathy Fan * Artnet *

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