The German philosopher Schelling has made a description about still life paintings goes: “I have no idea what position are they subordinate to, and whether they should be viewed as exceptive symbolic paintings, because they depict inexpressible activities and the trace of life…They pave the way through which we can apperceive the spirit of those who shaped the present arrangement.” And in order to decipher the “sprit” in Wang Yuhong’s paintings, we have to start by discussing about the influence exerted by the cultural metropolis nurtured her-Shanghai.Ever since 1843, the year Shanghai was opened as a trading port, the modernization and the separation of political circumscription incubated diverse culture atmosphere for the city. For instance, the Reformers and the Revolutionaries have congregated in Shanghai since the 1898 Reform Movement; moreover, under the reign of the Northern Warlords, the progressive northern literati came all the way down and gathered in Shanghai. Thus, Shanghai convened the elites of thought and culture all over the nation in the first half of the 20th century, as well as the substantial cultural bedrock and the broad cultural market which enabled Shanghai to produce the thoughtful and influential tide of culture. Furthermore, Shanghai was the platform in which Eastern and Western culture syncretized. Since British missionary Walter Medhurst established The London Missionary Society Press in Shanghai, numbers of institutions established to translate and publish western books. For instance, represented by the Institution of translation, Manufacturing Bureau of Jiangnan and the Commercial Press, those institutions have established the foundation for the introduction and prevalence of western thoughts and academic ideas in China. Not only the translation of western books and the uphold of western culture, but from a number of western literature and art forms including films, symphonies, new poems and novels to western conventions, clothes, utensils and even new life styles were accepted by Shanghai people and spread into the inner land of China. Buy in Wang Yuhong’s still life paintings, the shadow of “Shanghai School Culture” is concealed skillfully inside the timeworn blue-and-white porcelains and rouge boxes posed on the Ming and Qing table.However, the splendid Shanghai culture in the first half of the 20th century appears to be such old fashion to Wang Yuhong who was born in the 70s. As Beijing became the capital of China in the middle of the 20th century, many cultural elites have left Shanghai to Beijing and other major cities of the nation. Meanwhile, the influence of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union combining with the diplomatic blockade imposed by the western world resulted in the degeneration of Shanghai, that an opening “culture port” dramatically changed into an industrial base for the inner land of China. Furthermore, the establishment of the “planned economy” and the “politics dominance policy” brought a deadly wound for the culture operating mechanism of the former cultural metropolis. Ultimately, the Culture Revolution eradicated the root of “Shanghai School Culture” brutally.When the Culture Revolution came to the end in 1978, our female painter was just a young girl. Although Wang Yuhong has never experienced the feast of “Shanghai school culture”, the “unexposed films” were inevitably projected on her subconscious because Shanghai was the cradle of her growth. Freud has said that, “except for the matrix, nowhere can we confidently say that we had been there before”. Yet Wang Yuhong’s paintings happened to convey an idea that the matrix is revival. Perhaps that is the cause of the nostalgia pervading in the scenes of her paintings, and the reason for the sense of “yesterday once more” in those scenes. However, no where can we sense a tiny bit of ancientry in her paintings. It might be possible as well that she has no intention to commemorate things past, but it is the “unexposed films” or the fragment of time settled in her subconscious take us back to the blue and sensible times. We have no idea about her intention, and there is no need to know about it. What really matters is that, in facing her works, all we have to do is to set free and let our minds roam in the elapsed time she depicts.Actually, the first time I saw Wang Yuhong’s paintings, there was that one scene in Goethe’s Faust flashed in my mind, in which through the cavalier Faust’s eyes, Margaret’s room presents: “What stillness here environs me! Content and order brood around. What fulness in this poverty! In this small cell what bliss profound!” Just like looking at an old photograph, through which you realize a sense of simple and inornate from every element it bears. It just emerges as beauty for its simplicity. Yet, what we gain by combining those perceptions of simplicity is a sense of profundity. It is profound because even if it seems simple, it exposes the nature of complicated human world. Finally, those feelings of simplicity compose intricacy, because simple images are not simply comprehendible. Perhaps they just recall too many memories to give us a hint through which we can put them in order again.Beautiful things are always simple. In another word, simplicity is a form of beauty. If the beauty is merely an appearance, then profundity is hiding on the reverse side.