In the constantly shifting world of contemporary art, an artist's mind can easily be affected by the vast breadth of information surrounding them, leading to shifts in their own artistic creations. Only if one vigilantly maintains cultural consciousness and sustains one's vitality can an artist's art develop a vibrant interior logic. In the Chinese contemporary art world, Yu Hong is precisely such an artist. In this exhibition titled "Garden of Dreams", Yu Hong reveals her newest group of works from the past two years, displaying for us her sustained strength and creative passion, particularly in the depth of expression present in her paintings. Amongst these works, what is most noticeable is the artist's tendency towards continuity, which reveals the acuity of the artist's power to relate and steeply immerse herself in a self-created spiritual world. Her series on youth and on women overflowed with her dazed anxiety regarding the youth and expressed a way of approaching the world with both curiosity and trepidation. Following after that period of "being the crown amongst the forest" of her peers, the artist began to tend more and more towards a focus on the language of interior mental states and their relationship to understanding and experiencing the world, this new "Garden of Dreams" series marking an important new high point in the artist's career.

　　To Yu Hong, the "Garden of Dreams" of the title points towards the psychological, reflecting her attitude in recent years towards delving deeper and deeper into the nature of the human spirit. The journey inherent in this title is a meditative experience which has not yet been disturbed by the rest of the world. This space in which her spiritualized journey and visitation takes place is a floating, almost illusory "garden" within which she has carries out her independent expression in a state of imagination and experimentation. I believe that this sort of self-imposed journeying must have come about through her own spirit clashing against the outside world, the "dreams" are not dreams but her awakening, the "return of a secret sound" emanating between her spirit and the real world. In her works, all of the images and forms are established both in reality and in the surreal, in relationships between clear-cut realism and stream-of-consciousness narratives. In her wandering journey, she enters into a new realm full of fantasy that gives her works a strengthened visual gravitational pull creating a centrifugal sense of palpitation and an unguarded sense of weightlessness

　　In these works of Yu Hong, one primarily sees a situation closely entwined with the details of real life, with circumstances expressed through the concrete forms of her works, in the form of skies, mountains, the earth, bodies of water and living things inexorably linked to reality. But what she wants to express is the erroneous relationship between events and situations, a relationship that becomes magnified by her strong visual constructions, thus bringing the surreal subjective consciousness to stand before objective realism. On the surface of her paintings there appears a fantasy and a magic which surpasses the conventions of real space. It is an imaginative visualization and metaphysical crystallization. The early surrealists whose work we are all familiar with created fantastical dazzling landscapes, and though surrealism has already become a part of the history of modern art, the experience of surrealism itself particularly in terms of an individual's visual experience will never cease to remain relevant. Yu Hong works precisely with this, but what she practices and experiences is within a contemporary world, so what she creates is not in the classic surrealist tradition of expression but a contemporary version of it. In these dreamlike narratives, her observations are entwined with attributes of reality. Her deep observations are transformed into visual projections, constructing metaphors and symbols on the canvas. In the same sense, Yu Hong's "dreams” do not only limit themselves to the dreams of an individual, it is more that she uses a "dreamlike" means of narrative expression to experiences reality. Those paintings which depict the most exaggerated situations and figures exhibit the extremities of contemporary experience. The stretched forms in unfathomable circumstances place the material body and form it into a construct of psychological reality clarifying that human beings are not only living beings but beings within a society, with the uncountable masses of souls living across a vast range of societies all constituting one entity, encapsulating the relationships between humans and the world that surrounds them.

　　Yu Hong continues to work as a painter, and one of the most important and difficult questions in the contemporary art world is what path painting can continue to develop on. For Yu Hong however, it seems that any threats she comes across are not that severe. She is endowed with a great gift for painting, which allows her to calmly address any challenges she might face while at the same time focusing on purifying and refining the language of painting, injecting the painterly language with the power to counterbalance the imagery and means of other mediums. In fact this can be considered as an unchanging point of consideration throughout her entire life of painting. She is very adept at pondering over the imagery methods of contemporary painting, at different points in her creation gathering together new vocabulary through her research especially in terms of how visual composition can best express the focus of each work and project the initiative and leadership of the language of painting. One can see this in the series "Witness to Growth" which she has been working on for over a decade now. Over the course of its creation, she has “witnessed" painting being swept forward into completely new directions as well as "witnessed" her own journey through images and growth in painting. In the series "Witness to Growth", she used a composition and painting narrative of continuity to exhibit a visual space of temporality with the linked canvases constructing a story of development. In the later "Golden Sky" series, she created a three-dimensional longitudinal space borrowing from the painterly vocabulary of baroque religious painting to float figures on the ceiling. Those dancing, sailing, leaping forms formed a visual vortex leading towards heaven, striving to open up a new visual dimension. In "Garden of Dreams" we can see an entirely new spatial construction, one that is three-dimensional, intricately entwined and magical that creates an immense visual disorder between the human figures and their surroundings, resulting in a wide chasm between "here" and "there" pulling open vertical depth and creating horizontal dislocation. In many ways she is similar to a theatre director, her stage the canvas on which she directs each and everyone of her characters, each protagonist and offshoot of her mind. It is within this theatrical arrangement that Yu Hong's painting as a purer more self-possessed means of expression constructs an "extreme setting" that is displayed in the moving forms of this visual era implanted in the experience on the canvas. In this sense, Yu Hong is in a way constructing an entirely new method of painting.

　　In this series "Garden of Dreams", Yu Hong takes the capacity and style of the painting surface and fuses these two together. By using uneven edges and non-standard sized canvases she tailors the size and shape of each canvas to best express the situations and forms depicted in each painting. She does not observe the world by means of a rectangular canvas just as her thought process cannot be limited to the realm of simple squares and circles, but instead shifts according to her own experiences on her "journey." Her wanderings and pacing take on form and on the two-dimensional surface reveal a leap between time and space. Her painterly language can be described as "documentative fiction" which has not fully cast aside the tenants of a realistic figurative language and at the same time takes a rich swath of human figures and carves out their most detailed physical characteristics paired these together with archetypal surrealist images and dreamlike elements. The result is complex and supremely beautiful and remains long in the mind of the viewer even after only a passing glance. The inspiration for "Garden of Dreams" comes from the ancient Chinese theatrical work The Peony Pavilion, which is the most brilliant chapter of a longer series of plays. The "dreams" are somewhat like waking from sleep: it is Du Liniang[ Female protagonist of The Peony Pavillion] resisting the feudalistic Confucian code of ethics and waking into feminist self-awareness and Yu Hong as a female artist breaking free of her own shackles in her paintings to wake to a renewed observation and judgment towards the individual and towards society. The "dreams" that flow from Yu Hong's brush are not sweet or merry, but dreams of extreme experiences from which one wakes with a start, similar to what Hegel meant what he said, "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." There is a visual horror and a feeling of floating isolation, but the tones and colors that she paints with her brush construct a complete contradiction to this, a discrepancy between the language of emotional expression and an intense moral message. It is an interrogation into the caving of the spirit to superficial and vague interests and shallow and superficial thought.

　　In Yu Hong's paintings, time and space, East and West, the past and the present are inexorably and intricately linked, resulting in viewers experiencing this dreamscape from multiple levels. Her painting comes from the past and touch upon the future, with the "now" present in the works linking to a multitude of possible "worlds". One can say that Yu Hong constructed a "narrative" vein in time and space that belongs solely to her. In a time that goes on and on like a long road, these constructed and narrated instances and scenes allow us to obtain a comprehension of her "roaming thoughts".

作者：Fan,Di'an