Interview with Yu Hong's Characters

People Weekly: This work needs the audience to look up. What is the difference between technology and the past?

Yu Hong: It's definitely different. Usually painted on canvas, it is standing; This time, all the canvases were mounted on boards, and the boards were laid on the ground. For nearly a year, they were painted on their knees.

People Weekly: What do you want to change by making the audience look up?

Yu Hong: Looking up is often used to look at cave murals and church murals, most of which are related to religion, but my works have removed religious things and returned to our awe when we saw the world in the past. Now human beings are too self-expanding.

People Weekly: The series Witness Growth and Her are your main works, and both of them use the juxtaposition of photos and paintings. What is the consideration?

Yu Hong: Photographs and paintings are both flat visual images, and both pay attention to authenticity. To some extent, photography is more real, but photography is often not real. It's hard to say whether people pose in the best position when taking pictures. I put photos and pictures together to see how people live in society and how they want society to see her from different angles. The series of photos of "She" are all provided by myself. I drew more than 20 people, most of whom provided photos of posing in various shapes in tourist attractions or wearing national costumes and fashions in photo studios and posing as stars in magazines. It seems that the media has a great influence on people's aesthetics.

People Weekly: You didn't just draw according to the photos.

Yu Hong: Yes, it integrates my understanding of their living environment and state.

People weekly: witnessing growth reflects your view of history. In your opinion, what is real history?

Yu Hong: I doubt that anything is absolutely true. For example, those photos were published by our domestic media, and after being reviewed by news organizations at different levels, they represent the voice of the country and have the value of the country behind them.

People Weekly: Is the "Witness of Growth" series still being painted?

Yu Hong: Once a year. Year after year, people will grow up and get old, and society will move from closed to open. What will happen in the next few decades is unknown, magical and unpredictable.

People Weekly: Liu Xiaodong said that art is a doomed industry, and success is just luck. what do you think?

Yu Hong: This may be his idea. Indeed, it is difficult to get recognition from others in art. With so many art students graduating every year, how many can continue to paint? Looking back five years later, maybe only two or three of 10 are still painting, because the skills he learned are not very sustainable. For example, if you study as a lawyer, you can't be a barrister, and there's nothing wrong with being a lawyer for a living. Painting is always competing with itself. Only by convincing yourself first can we take the next step.

People Weekly: What do you convince yourself to do?

Yu Hong: What do you like to draw? You can draw anything on the canvas, but you can only draw one. I just couldn't convince myself before, and I didn't know what to draw. I wasted it until I could answer this question one day.

Why are the ideals like this now?

People Weekly: How much influence did "85 Trendy" have on you?

Yu Hong: It was a very open period, and all kinds of media and new things were very impactful. I am only in my early twenties, and I will attend some of their exhibitions, but I am not particularly active, because I am suspicious of fashionable things. I watched the Cultural Revolution when I was a child. I marched here these two days and put up posters. A few days later, I erased the cover and wrote it again.

People Weekly: You have made two films: The White Line by Bird and The Day of Winter and Spring by Wang Xiaoshuai.

Yu Hong: The White Line is Bird's graduation work, several years earlier than Wang Xiaoshuai's. "The Day of Winter and Spring" is a complete film, and "White Line" is only a short film of 10 minutes. I was in the state of graduation, and I was in a panic. I don't know which direction to go in the future. At that time, there was not much material insecurity, unlike buying a house as soon as I graduated now, but I was mentally confused. I think I am a person who can start all over again at any time.

People Weekly: You have experienced the biggest social change in China for more than 40 years.

Yu Hong: It is good for us to become more and more open from authoritarian political culture to now, but it is not necessarily good for young people. They directly face the commercial society, not the political system, and everything is quantified by money, which is terrible. Under the pressure of business, if you don't follow suit, you will die. It looks free and diverse, but in fact, the control has penetrated into the details.

People Weekly: The materialistic times make artists feel uncomfortable.

Yu Hong: Of course, so I think I was born and raised in a better era. Being controlled and regulated as a child; In adolescence, life is making public and ideology is also making public, which is quite rhythmic. People nowadays are free to eat, drink and have fun when they are young. In society, it is not good to find such a great pressure to fix him there. The child came back and told me that the school teacher said, "If you don't study hard, you will be expelled from the company in the future." This is the bright future that the teacher described to them! Just sit in the company, step by step, or you will be fired if you don't do well. What was my ideal when I was a child? Realize communism! It's empty, but at least there's a height. Why are the ideals like this now? They seem to have many choices, but in fact, they have no choice but to take the road given by society. Just like my painting Ladder, everyone has only one ladder. If you don't go up, you have to go down.

People Weekly: What do you think is the biggest problem in China in the past 40 years?

Yu Hong: People are unhealthy and unhappy. The pace of life in China is probably the fastest in the world, and the work pressure and family responsibilities are also the heaviest.

People Weekly: What about yourself?

Yu Hong: Try to slow yourself down. Still too soon. For example, booking an exhibition must be completed at this time, and the only option is to work overtime. I have to paint for eight or nine hours a day, and I often paint until midnight, which is particularly tiring.

People Weekly: Is there any confusion in life now?

Yu Hong: No, because I accepted it. Confused because you think: Why is this so and not so? If you accept it, it should be like this. Although it is unreasonable or you don't like it, there is nothing confusing.

People Weekly: Are you an optimist?

Yu Hong: I think life as a whole is pessimistic. Do you see more interesting things or boring things in your life, maybe half and half, or even more boring. But if you watch this every day and refuse to accept it, you can't live. It's like paying a ticket If you don't pay at all, you will be in trouble. Xinmin Weekly interviewed, "I still hope that every painting will be drawn slowly. If you have such a personality, you can only do so. "

During the period of 1993, Wang Xiaoshuai took Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong, alumni of the Middle School Attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, as the prototype, and filmed his debut "Days of Winter and Spring". Different from the tragic situation that the painter lost his mind in the winter and his wife miscarried in the spring in the movie, today Liu Xiaodong is a painter whose paintings have been auctioned for over 10 million yuan, and his wife Yu Hong, as expected when her grandmother named her, became more and more popular.

Materially, they are indeed middle-class, but the life of artistic couples is really like that described by Yu Hong in a self-report eight years ago: "Time has changed everything, and now we are all middle-aged people who hate moderation and boredom most in their youth."

Following 16, Wang Xiaoshuai once again took Yu Hong as the leading role and filmed the documentary "After Winter and Spring-Yu Hong Pian" in 2009. In the film, Liu Xiaodong jealously asked who Yu Hong sent a text message to, and joked from time to time that "we have no love now"; While visiting her husband who painted a horse in Yanguan, Gansu Province, through Dunhuang, Yu Hong learned that her father-in-law had a sudden cerebral thrombosis, but hesitated to tell Liu Xiaodong immediately. ...

The latest exhibition of "After Winter and Spring-Yu Hong Pian" was shown on the evening of August 7, and this two-month exhibition will last until September 15, in line with Yu Hong's latest solo exhibition "Scenes of the Golden Sky" at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing 798 Art District. On September 4th, Yu Hong and Li Bo, a restoration expert of Dunhuang Art Research Institute, will discuss "Where is Dunhuang?" .

The creative blueprints of Patio, Tian Wen, Natural Selection and Sky Curtain in the Golden Sky Scene are respectively: Italian zenith painting Hercules and the Four Seasons, Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes main room west wall painting 32 1, Goya copperplate painting Absurdity and Xinjiang Qizil.

These four masterpieces continue the ideas and styles of "Love in Spring" (2008) and "Ladder" (2008) in the exhibition "Yu Hong: Inside and Outside Time" in Guangdong Art Museum last May. "Love in Spring" and "Ladder" are medieval paintings of Zhang Xuan in Tang Dynasty and Catherine Monastery in Mount Sinai, Egypt, respectively, but they have been removed.

All four new works were placed on the roof of the exhibition hall, becoming a long-lost artificial "zenith painting" in modern art space. Yu Hong tried to "create works that transcend different cultural barriers and pursue the essence of life through the research and reinterpretation of traditional culture and the concern and thinking of the real society."

Yu Hong in creation and daily life (if it can be distinguished) is actually very traditional. Although labeled as feminist by western art critics, a large part of Yu Hong's Sina blog is about her husband's creation and exhibition. She is adjacent to Liu Xiaodong's studio, in the deepest part of the 798 Art District. I don't think it is necessary to be so frugal with their financial resources, but the mother of this 16-year-old child has maintained the diligence of most Beijing girls, which shows that she is not strong enough to bargain with the real estate.

Since 1980, when Beijing and Liaoning were admitted to the middle school attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Yu Hong's life has been linked with Liu Xiaodong. Journalists will always ask her again and again how to treat the "gap" between her and her husband who debuted at the same time in terms of creative efficiency and painting price. I don't think Yu Hong will be really angry even if she is a little annoyed. She has her artistic view-although not necessarily so talkative, she has her artistic determination.