Yu Hong，”Night Walk”(2023)，acrylic on canvas，3parts: 300 x 250 cm, 118 1/8 x 98 3/8 in each. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery ©Yu hong

In Night Walk, preeminent painter Yu Hong weaves together her personal experiences and memories with significant collective shifts in contemporary China, portraying epochal transformation within sprawling compositions. In six large-scale, richly detailed paintings and three small studies of hands, Yu Hong evokes classical art historical motifs drawn from a variety of sources, including Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Blind Leading the Blind (1568), Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), El Greco’s The Crucifixion (1597–1600), and others, as well as traditional Chinese painting tropes from the culture’s many-centuries-long heritage. The artist’s psychologically rich subjects exist within a riotous tumult of dramatic, otherworldly scenes, establishing a nuanced dialogue between the individual figure and a surreal setting. The disquieting nature of her groupings evokes human fragility and the ever-present social tensions between isolation and togetherness. Yet they also speak to an insistent resilience and the eternal hope that can be found in a landscape of the imagination.

Yu Hong, "Pyramid," 2022, acrylic on canvas, two parts: 118 1/8 x 98 3/8 in. each. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery. © Yu Hong. Photo by Yang Hao.

Night Walk is organized by SCAD Museum of Art chief curator Daniel S. Palmer.

The exhibition runs from 21 September 2023 – 29 January 2024.

Yu Hong

About the artist

Yu Hong (b. 1966, Xi’an, China) studied oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing and earned a post-graduate degree in 1996. The artist’s recent solo exhibitions include The World of Saha at the Long Museum, Shanghai; Garden of Dreams at the CAFA Art Museum, Beijing; Concurrent Realms at the Suzhou Museum, China; Golden Horizon at the Shanghai Art Museum; and Golden Sky at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. Her work was also featured in Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

(Courtesy of Lisson Gallery)