Yu Hong, "Unknown Life and Death" (2023)
Installation view of "Tossing in the Dust", 2024
Originally founded by the Church of St. Augustine, this Romano-Byzantine church in the 10th century was closed in the 19th century after plagues, wars, reorganizations, donations and resales. On April 20, with the opening of the 60th Venice Biennale, Yu Hong's first major solo exhibition in Europe, Another One Bites the Dust, was unveiled to the public in this church.
Installation view of "Tossing in the Dust", 2024
"The exhibition of Yu Hong's work in this Venetian church is significant and enriching. As a female artist, a mother, a wife, as a person who paints from the standpoint of a Chinese woman's body, inserting her intuitive ideas of life and death into the sacred spaces of a church, there are very few precedents for such – in fact, I can't think of any other female artist whose work has ever dominated an entire church. So, maybe for the first time in history. We are not interested in religion, we are interested in the questions that revolve around religion: where are we going? What is life? What is the meaning of death? What does it mean to be physically present? What does aging mean? What does it mean to have children? These questions are the foundation of any religion, the essence of Christianity, and the driving force behind Yu Hong's series of paintings. Dr. Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of the Guggenheim Museum's Global Art Department, said. This exhibition is part of the Guggenheim Museum's "Asian Art Project" off-site project, which can be traced back to Meng Lu's 2017 group exhibition "Art and China 89 Years Later: Theater of the World" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which focused on Chinese contemporary art.
Yu Hong, "Life" (2022)
Installation view of "Tossing in the Dust", 2024
The title of the exhibition, "Another One Bites the Dust", is taken from the song of the same name released by Queen in 1980, and the lyrics describe the struggles faced by human beings on a daily basis, which can also be traced back to the King James Bible, and Lu Xun also used "tossing in the dust" to describe "the tragedy of past experience" in "Reflections 25". The centerpiece of the exhibition is the 10 paintings "Walking Through Life" (2019-2022), arranged in an arc along the walls of the building, which presents from left to right the life of human beings at different stages of life influenced by social norms, gender roles and political realities: four children perform difficult gymnastic movements, a couple of lovers lie on a stone, the girl seems to be a little distracted, and two men lie on the ground as if they have been caught in a crime. Scantily clad young female sex workers hide their appearance, while three men and a dog bend into a black box in search of ...... The people who follow the picture seem to be walking on the trajectory of their own lives, and finally come to the layers of barefoot, which are nameless corpses and allegories of this era.
Yu Hong, "Ups and Downs of the Sea of Desire" (2023)
Installation view of "Tossing in the Dust", 2024
Created especially for this exhibition, Rise and Fall of the Sea (2023) pays homage to Caravaggio's famous 1607 Le opere della Misericordia (Seven Good Deeds) from Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples, inspired by a photograph she saw of a news photograph of a girl who had fallen from a building and was rescued. The woman in white is falling, and at the same time seems to be a threat to others, two men are fighting shirtless while others are pressed to the ground, children are playing with their hands covering their ears to keep out the noise, and next to them, a woman in green leans against a golden background, twisting her body and outstretching one arm, a pose inspired by a performance by modern choreographer Pina Bausch, the only woman in the picture who moves independently and autonomously. "Caravaggio's Seven Good Deeds is more about the situation in life for me. "The Ups and Downs of the Sea of Desire" discusses a sense of fall, the reaction and situation of life when it encounters some urgent or uncertain state. Yu Hong said in an interview with Art News.
Yu Hong, "Ship of Fools" (2021)
Installation view of "Tossing in the Dust", 2024
On the opposite side of The Rise and Fall of the Sea, the main entrance to the church is obscured by the 9-meter-long Ship of Fools (2021), in which the towering galleon appears to run aground on the floor of the church. Plato's allegory of failed governance was popularized by Hieronymus Bosch's political satire on the Catholic Church in the 15th century. Yu Hong's adaptation places children and animals clinging to the edge of the boat in the torrent of melting icebergs. In doing so, the state's faults condemn orphaned migrants to ecological catastrophe, and in turn broaden the connotation of their grand narrative from home to planet.
Created during the pandemic, most of the works in the exhibition are based on the artist's own image library, photographs taken on a daily basis, and what he sees on the Internet and social media, mostly women and young people, and the cycles and trajectories of human life—birth, life, desire, and death—that speak of the crises that individuals face in general and reflect the vulnerability of meaning in the face of catastrophic destruction.
Yu Hong, "Death" (2022)
Installation view of "Tossing in the Dust", 2024
As a well-known contemporary Chinese artist and a witness and participant in China's surging contemporary art movement since the 80s of the last century, Yu Hong is known for her large-scale figurative paintings, which delicately portray her personal experiences from a unique female perspective, reflecting the lives of her peers and witnessing the great changes that have taken place in Chinese society. However, as Yu Hong's first large-scale solo exhibition in Europe, "Tossing in the Dust" has more vision and ambition.
Yu Hong's work warns of the instability and crisis of political reality, the uncertainty of the city, region, and national environment, and the threat of war and a runaway world. In fact, these questions have long been present in the 90s of the 20th century, when Yu Hong was an important member of the 'new generation' group, when she painted for friends, lovers, and family, at a time when China was facing a vision of a hugely uncertain future, and the world at that time was no different. "But my goal in curating this exhibition is to get Yu Hong's work out of the Chinese context—her work has been relegated to too many theories, but we always look at her in the Chinese context, and I want to argue for her status as an international artist, and to see how she deals with the big themes that artists in the world share today." What we're trying to do is put on a par with figurative artists who deal with big issues of life and history: Marlene Dumas, Maria Lassnig, Michael Armitage, not just Liu Xiaodong and Zeng Fanzhi. She should be regarded as a great female artist, who depicts the grand themes and horrors of her time. ”
Yu Hong in the "Tossing in the Dust" exhibition view Image source: Art News
Art News interviewed Yu Hong
Q=The Art News
A=Yu Hong
Q: When did you start preparing for this exhibition?
A: Meng Lu started discussing this project with me after curating the 2017 Guggenheim Museum exhibition "Art and China after '89: Theater of the World" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and she always wanted to do an exhibition for me in Venice. After so many years, the epidemic has passed, the world has changed, the exhibition has changed, and the works have changed. Most of my works were completed during the pandemic, when countries and cities were in a state of pause, and the pressure of the changing world on individuals and the sudden pause of surprise are reflected in my works.
I came here to look at the space after the exhibition hall was determined last year, and I was very impressed because it was very powerful and crude, and it changed from a magnificent Baroque building to a space with a bit of a sense of ruins now, in which the power of time condensation is particularly strong. The painting "Rising and Falling in the Sea" presented on the main altar in the exhibition was created exactly according to the size of the altar, and most of the other works were completed before the space was found.
Yu Hong, "Rise and Fall of the Sea of Desire", acrylic on canvas, 340 x 140 cm, 2023
Q: But the other works in this exhibition also give people a very strong sense of religion.
A: I've always been very interested in life and the process of life, and many of my past works, such as "Witnessing Growth", are about the relationship between growth in life and the surrounding environment. Several of the works in this exhibition, such as "Life" and "Death", including "Walking Through Life", are consistent with the main themes that I have been creating for a long time. It is only in such a space that I hope to have more of a dialogue with such a strong tradition of religious painting here in Venice, because religious painting also discusses the most basic questions related to our lives, such as who we are, where we come from, where we are going, how we should live, what it means to live and die, these are our most basic and unavoidable questions. I hope to be able to use my work in such a space to have a dialogue with these past traditions and the turmoil and dilemmas that we are facing the world today.
Q: How do you relate the eternal problem of humanity to such a specific topic as growth?
A: My focus on life is related to my own life experience. When I am growing up and my next generation is growing, I will be concerned about how people grow up and how people relate to the world, to history, to everything around them. From the growth of the individual, I will gradually expand to include more women, or the relationship between the people around me and the world. In this exhibition, I am actually going beyond my personal limitations to discuss everyone. No matter what country or culture you are in, life is always facing the most basic problems, and I would like to discuss such the most basic problems that everyone will encounter.
Q: What kind of consideration does it seem that there is no human face in the work "Ups and Downs of the Sea"?
A: I actually like people when they don't have a positive face, because when a person is positive, it will be a person who wants to express what he wants to present, such as sitting upright, or deliberately posing a pose. But in reality, people are in a hurry, they may be in a hurry in their own world, and they may be completing a task that is difficult for them to complete. Everyone is in their own situation, not in a position to be seen, and I want to be able to express life as it really is.
Yu Hong, "Walking Through Life", acrylic on canvas, ten couplets,
300 x 1200 x 10 cm, 2019-2022
Q: In "Walking Through Life", the faces of the people can still be seen in the first few screens, and the faces of the people also disappear in the later pictures, is this also due to this idea?
A: Yes, I only found out about this problem after I finished drawing. At the beginning of the painting, the image is of a child, and then little by little, by the time life is full of desires and struggles, in fact, they have lost this positive image, they are all living in their own difficulties, so they have no time to show themselves.
Q: In what ways do you think there is a connection between your artistic practice and the space of the Church of the Abbey of Mercy, and how do they collide?
A: I have always been particularly interested in religious art, religious paintings, especially religious paintings, including the Middle Ages and the Baroque period. In the past, when I was studying art history in school, the Middle Ages was always portrayed in textbooks as a dark, long and boring period, but then I went to Europe to see many museums that recorded the medieval period, including altarpieces and wood carvings of that period, which were very shocking, this is a kind of restrained shock, because religion has a lot of restrictions on art, including subject matter, style, painting space restrictions, etc., and artists need to present its power and pattern as much as possible in these limitations.
Later, I felt more and more that these religious arts are actually the condensation of hundreds of thousands of years of human thinking about this ultimate question, including the question of how to express religion in the form of art, which has been honed from generation to generation, rather than just an abstract concept or an individual effort, which has a very deep power.
Yu Hong, "Unknown Life and Unknown Death", acrylic on canvas, 30 x 43 cm, 2023
I was amazed even by the effect of this exhibition, although most of the works were completed before finding space, they form an organic whole, presenting a symbiotic relationship. Although the exhibition space itself used to be a church, it no longer has a religious function, and the tempering of time has made it lose its original religious nature, and it is more about history or the polishing of history over thousands of years.
Q: How do you look back at your work 20 or 30 years ago?
A: I will lament that life has become too fast, I can't draw the paintings of the past now, and the problems I used to focus on are not the problems I am concerned about now. Every step seems to go faster and faster, and the world is getting faster and faster. So when I look back at my past work, I often ask myself: OK, okay?
(Article from Art News Chinese Edition)
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