Lot 12: - Yu Hong , b. 1966 She - Beautiful Writer Zhao Bo acrylic on canvas, black and white photograph

signed H.Yu and dated 2004 ; signed, titled and dated 2004 in Chinese on the reverse acrylic on canvas, black and white photograph

painting: 59 by 118 1/8 in. 150 by 300 cm. photograph: 66 3/4 by 45 5/8 in. 169.6 by 115.8 cm.

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, China Onward, Denmark, 2007, pp. 373-375, illustrated in color

Now a highly acclaimed mid-career artist, Yu Hong is one of a handful of Beijing artists who in their youth reformed figurative realism. Gradually, first as a student and then as a professor at the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts, she honed in on the everyday lives of women and girls as her primary subject. The paintings, She--Beautiful Writer Zhao Bo (Lot 12) and Toy--Shark (Lot 13), make clear the wealth of possibilities to be mined within this subject: the former work belongs to a major series examining the lives of women in contemporary China; the latter is a snapshot view of the detritus that clamors for attention once one becomes a mother. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, new media and new painting modes exerted a siren call on many young artists in China. Yu Hong and her cohorts, the so-called New Generation painters, chose however to build upon their extremely rigorous training in realist figurative oil painting, but turned to subjects alien to an academic system that was in the process of emerging from the reign of socialist realism. Where socialist realism was concerned with the instructive drama of grand gestures, heroes and anti-heroes, Yu Hong and her peers' works were self-reflective, examining mundane moments in the lives of young urbanites. Yu Hong's selection of the everyday lives of women as her core theme had few precedents: generally, throughout the history of Chinese art, women had played didactic, symbolic or supporting roles. Since 1999, Yu Hong has created several painting series, each of which explores a theme in depth. The first two chronicle the lives of her and her daughter, with links to current events. A third series, She, depicts female family members, friends, and strangers posed in their everyday environments and identified by profession: an artist, a real estate developer, an entrepreneur, a security guard, a professor (her mother), a retired worker (her mother-in-law), a Tibetan peasant, a writer (She--Beautiful Writer Zhao Bo), and so on. Yu Hong asks each subject to contribute a photograph of herself, to stand as a counterpoint to the artist's point of view as expressed in the painting. With her rare talent for observing gestural nuance, in She--Beautiful Writer Zhao Bo Yu Hong has captured the lifestyle and attitude of a successful young women in the new China. We see Yu Hong's often edgy color sense and signature painterly manner at play in both She--Beautiful Writer Zhao Bo and Toy--Shark. In its proportions, rising perspective, and near-blank ground, Toy echoes the format of a traditional Chinese occasional painting. However, where such a painting might display an arrangement of plants and objects symbolically expressing wishes for good fortune, Toy--Shark juxtaposes a good wish symbol--the gold fish decoration--with cheap plastic toys including a toy gun. Such is the condition of modern life, haphazardly combining the old and the new, with unpredictable results: under such conditions a painting ostensibly depicting naught but cheap toys and a plant may reveal unexpected depths of meaning. -Britta Erickson