Author: YU HONG 喻红

Size: 185×230cm

Signed and dated: Painted in 1999

Estimate: 2,600,000 -3,200,000

Final Price: RMB 2,650,000

signed in Chinese and dated 1999
LITERATURE
2000 Works of 20th Century Chinese Oil Painting Exhibition / P298 / Guangxi Fine Arts Publishing House
2002 Chinese Oil Painting Literature 1542-2000 / P17-18 / Hunan Art Press

EXHIBITED
2000 20th Century Chinese Oil Painting Exhibition China Art Museum, Beijing
2009 I Can Believe-Chinese Contemporary Artists Invitational Exhibition Beijing Fanxing Art Museum, Beijing
2011 Fusion and Creation II-Academic Invitation Exhibition of Chinese Oil Painting Masters Art Museum of Chinese Academy of Oil Painting, Beijing
2011 Art Works Exhibition of the 30th Anniversary of the Founding of the National Academy of Painting China National Museum of China, Beijing

In the male dominated art history, women have been struggling for a long time to gain the right to speak and the right to gender equality. Since the 1960s, more and more female artists have been involved in the art world. In the face of the limitations of traditional gender roles and the misunderstandings and prejudices they have faced for a long time in their career, they have constantly broken through. On the one hand, they have actively ploughed deep into the art field to promote the continuous expansion of contemporary art in the core fields of language, content and boundaries. At the same time, they have also aimed at the problems in the current world, such as identity politics, social reconciliation Environmental issues and other important issues, from the unique perspective of women, give voice to women and the world. With the rise of female artists, the 21st century has officially entered a wonderful‘Her Era’.
Born in the 1950s, Yan Ping is famous for her magnificent atmosphere and bright colors in her paintings. Her works have changed the graceful style of previous female artists, showing a hot and strong expressionism style, which is unique in the contemporary painting world. Most of her subjects come from her own life experience and emotional experience. In form, her has widely absorbed the characteristics of Fauvism, cubism and German expressionism painting, and is good at shaping objects with exaggeration and deformation. Her works are full of strong poetic and romantic imagination while showing superb painting skills.
In Green Crops (Lot 1130) in 2003, Yan Ping entered a world of disorder and order. Here, the painter broke the inherent time sequence and spatial pattern in the painting, and completely formed a unique picture rhythm with flying lines and overlapping color blocks, showing the exuberant internal vitality of the crop land. The artist replaced perspective with color, ignoring the volume, brightness and distance of the object, and reconstructed the landscape with planarized composition and subjective color. The crops are distributed up and down, dividing the picture into geometric shapes of different sizes, with loose leaves interspersed between them. The background highlights the simplicity and purity of the foreground with a large area of gray flat painting. In the lower left corner, the mother hidden in the crop field is holding her young son to pee. The mother’s vigilance and the young son’s impatience show a funny scene in rural life, and the mother and son are also integrated into the overall cool tone. This painting is a rare work by Yan Ping to explore the structure and show a sense of humor.
As a representative of the‘new generation’ of artists, Yu Hong’s paintings are famous for their realism and subjective narrative style. She is good at describing her personal experiences and stories from a female perspective, and shows the fragments of daily life in a calm, objective and straightforward way. She combines individual identity, inner emotion and incredible space, thus endowing her works with a new look of the times and revealing a universal human situation.
Throughout the 1990s, Yu Hong’s works showed a strong autobiographical nature, with the theme of‘stories about human sensitivity, fragility, dignity, separation, helplessness, sincerity and love’. The works of this series often juxtapose the present and past private images in the same space, breaking the separation between time and space with a misplaced combination, so that the past and present canvases are staggered and parallel. Multiply (Lot 1129) in 1999 is Yu Hong’s important creation with her own family as the background. In the middle of the picture is Yu Hong’s family of four. The parents, brothers and sisters of Yu Hong and Liu Xiaodong are respectively on the upper left and right. The work places the relatives of different times on the same plane. The main characters in the former group use the form of color family photos to represent the present and the present; The latter two groups of characters use the form of faded photos with a more sense of the times, representing their parents’ youth and lost time. The three groups of characters are in the lake water, surrounded by Taihu stone, closely connected: the green lake water symbolizes the endless life, and the surrounding Taihu stone represents the bond and inheritance between families. Here, the painter describes the warm and profound ties between individuals, blood ties and families in an imaginative but highly realistic way.
As a leader of the‘new generation’ of artists, Shen Ling, like Yu Hong, is obsessed with describing daily life. However, compared with Yu Hong’s real records, Shen Ling prefers to publicize the wanton expressionist style and is willing to express her understanding of life through strong strokes and pure colors. In the history of Chinese contemporary art, Shenling is the first female artist to express the theme of‘sex and love’ as a subject. Drawing Around The Stove (Lot 1131), which was created in 1994, can be regarded as one of the most important personal creations in Shen Ling’s career. It perfectly interprets the artist’s unique personal style and artistic appearance. In the picture, the artist reproduces a scene full of fun: with the warm fire, a man and a woman (probably the artist and her husband Wangyuping) are focusing on sketching naked female models. Although facing the same object, their pictures are different because of their different focus. The artist has keenly captured a humorous episode in this ordinary corner, and then, through its iconic caricature like exaggerated modeling and unrestrained strong colors, the artist has merged the splendor and chaos, prudence and humor into a furnace, which makes the viewer laugh.
Wei Rong, another female artist after the 1960s, also replaced the mainstream paradigm of grand narrative with a private perspective in her individual creation. She likes to repeatedly depict the little people in the big times and show their ordinary and busy lives; Or we can observe historical events or historical figures from a longer distance, and give them new meaning with contemporary concepts and novel visual schemas.
Rehearsal (Lot 1132), created in 1994, is a representative work of the above stages. It depicts the rehearsal moment of a celebration. Wei Rong shows two completely different worlds in the space divided up and down the stage. There is not only the comparison of gender, but also the collision of two aesthetic concepts represented by classical dance and modern music - in the progress of the times, the ancient and the present, the new and the old, silence and noise, everything is in constant impact and agitation. Like other works, Wei Rong also used the technique of photographic realism to objectively and clearly reproduce the original scene on the canvas, with realistic and vivid modeling, exquisite depiction and meticulous details. However, Wei Rong’s photographic realism is not an art school of the same name in the United States in the 1970s. Here, she has abandoned the stern and indifferent naturalistic style of the original school, and put more emphasis on the living atmosphere and perceptual elements.