Yu Hong

b. 1966

Yu Hong was born in 1966 in Xi’an, China. She graduated from the oil painting department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing in 1988 and has taught there ever since. She became part of China’s ‘New Generation’ artists, seeking to capture the effects of rapid societal and economic change on individual lives.

Yu Hong’s paints contemporary fables and complex, allegorical compositions that centre around the boiled-down experience of humanity, the cycle of life: birth, life, desire, sex and death. Since ’90s she has been working on a lifelong autobiographical project, Witness to Growth, which consists of a series of diptychs that chart her life alongside news clippings from each era.

Yu Hong’s first major American museum show opened in 2023 at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA and her work was featured in ‘Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World’ (2017) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Recent solo exhibitions in China include: ‘The World of Saha’ (2019) at Long Museum, Shanghai; ‘Garden of Dreams’ (2016) at the CAFA Art Museum, Beijing; ‘Concurrent Realms’ (2015) at the Suzhou Museum; ‘Golden Horizon’ (2011) at the Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai and ‘Golden Sky’ (2010) at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

@yuhongstudio