In one of the most breathtaking showcase of paintings we have seen this season, Beijing's Yu Hong has produced a stunning new body of work, Night Walk, at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah.
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.
Night Walk is organized by SCAD Museum of Art chief curator Daniel S. Palmer.
