Yu Hong brings supernatural realism to Venice

There’s birth, there’s death and there’s that odd bit in-between; full of pleasure and pain, emotion and apathy, faith and disappointment. Chinese artist Yu Hong doesn’t seem interested in the small stuff. She doesn’t think about it, she doesn’t paint it and you won’t find any in ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, her latest show, in a deconsecrated church in Venice. She’s interested in the boiled-down experience of humanity, the cycle of life: birth, life, desire, sex and death. “When conceiving this exhibition, I wanted to have a dialogue with the religious art there, which essentially conveys contemplation of the ultimate questions of life,” she explains via email.

You won’t find small ideas, but you will find detail, in droves. Yu’s brand of supernatural realism is as though Byzantine icons or the characters of Buddhist narrative painting were reborn in the digital age; as if Song dynasty group portraiture acquired the sacred grace of Michelangelo, the contortions of Caravaggio and the brutal flesh of Egon Schiele.

Yu was born in Xi’an, China in 1966. In the 1980s, she studied painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, where she has taught since her graduation. Back then, soviet-style realism was de rigueur in Chinese art academies. But it wasn’t realism at all. It was the construction of a romanticised utopia under communism, which painted over all human complexity. Yu didn’t subscribe; she became part of China’s ‘New Generation’ artists, seeking to capture the effects of rapid societal and economic change on individual lives. “That label is something that art critics came up with,” she says. “It was neither a group nor an organisation, but rather a group of young artists whose creations abandon grand collective narrative perspectives and turn to expressing their views on the world through individual narratives.”

When Yu graduated in the late 1980s, China’s reform and opening-up policies were still in their infancy, and society was still relatively closed. “Contemporary art was in a very marginalised state and artists experienced general anxiety about the uncertainty of their future. Nowadays, young artists enjoy a better creative environment and a broader international perspective, but they also have their own anxieties; each generation faces different problems,” she explains. “China has been experiencing rapid development, particularly in this turbulent international environment where drastic changes happen every day.”

The exhibition, presented by the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Initiative and curated by Dr Alexandra Munroe, has been in the works since 2018. Between then and now, Yu visited Venice many times to find the right location. She eventually settled on a deconsecrated Romanesque-Byzantine church. “Chiesetta della Misericordia is highly appropriate both in style and in size. Condensed through the baptism of history, the space possesses a profound sense of time, which fits well with the style and theme of my work.” Yu says, noting the church’s “powerful aura”. “The whole church has five altars… I have decided to create a new work for the main altar so that my previous work can truly create an organic connection with this space,” she says.

The cavaseses mirror the motifs of religious iconography; arched or circular in shape with gold backgrounds. “I have been using gold as the background of my paintings for almost 20 years. I very much like it as a colour, it makes the picture bright and brilliant. But the most important thing is that gold itself is very special, it’s been used to represent power, wealth, and faith since ancient times, both in Western and the Eastern painting traditions,” Yu explains.

Her figures, mostly women and young people, originate from social media scrolls, internet searches or her own photographs. She prefers naturalistic photos over staged sittings. “Nowadays it’s extremely easy to have access to images – what has become important is what images you choose,” she says.

Inside the Chiesetta della Misericordia we find the full spectrum of human experience; as futile as essential. Walking Through Life (2019–22), a polyptych of epic proportions and impact, staged in a semicircle in the church’s choir; a baby is born and separated from its mother; it bathes in a tub. Then four children do gymnastics (a subject Yu has often returned to after observing her daughter practice). “Watching these children train was both brutal and beautiful,” she recalls “This brutality is not just on the physical level but it also hints at the discipline of life.” After a panel depicting two young lovers, things take a sour turn as two men lie face-down, handcuffed (‘biting the dust’), followed by depictions of several girls who seem to be sex workers, whose bodies are reduced to hollow social media fodder – “both panels represent the conflict between desire and morality,” says Yu. Next, a woman’s body is wrapped in cling film, a method some use for weight loss. Towards the end, three elderly people and a dog wrestle in limbo – for what, we don’t know, but they’re angry. Then death comes knocking, its arrival noted in a stack of cadavers with bound feet. “This series of panels starts with life and ends with death, with desires in between; together they are about the process of fighting against desire before reaching the end of one’s life,” says Yu.

Her new work for the apse, titled Make a Wish (2023) was made-to-measure for the church’s Baroque altar. It’s a nod to Caravaggio’s The Acts of Mercy (Le opere della Misericordia, 1607) at the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples and encompasses seven human events – “each one extreme and desperate but somehow miraculous too,” says Yu.

Each of her figures tells their own tales of torment, social disenfranchisement, abject violence, and sometimes even joy. Her paintings seem to say that divine interventions, good and evil, are created here on Earth; that there are two certainties – birth and death – sandwiching a frenzied mess of uncertainty. In all their contorted discomfort, they try to make sense of what it means to spin around on this watery rock waiting for someone, something to deliver the punchline.