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""Published to accompany a major site-specific installation in Venice, Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust offers an in-depth examination of the work of one of China’s foremost living artists, renowned internationally for her virtuosic large-scale figurative paintings. Yu Hong’s (born 1966) practice centers on humane depictions of contemporary life that are both deeply personal and astute in their observations of larger societal realities. Featuring beautiful installation photography of Venice’s Chiesetta della Misericordia, this book presents a new cycle of works painted on gold ground that depict the arc of human experience while referencing aspects of Buddhist narrative painting, Byzantine icons and the Italian Baroque. Through her lushly painted stories, she considers the radical changes pressed on humanity by the speed and totality of globalization, the existential climate emergency, diaspora and dispossession in many parts of the world, and the uneven histories of postcolonialism. Yu Hong’s subject is the precarity of meaning in the face of calamitous disruption."-- Provided by publisher."@en
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""Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust will feature new figurative and narrative paintings that respond to the architectural and cultural context of the Chiesetta della Misericordia, a deconsecrated Romanesque-Byzantine church founded by Augustinian friars in the tenth century. Conditioned by this architectural site, the exhibition will present Yu Hong’s work outside the bounds of art-historical conventions, examining the artist’s worlding of supernatural realism as a radically anachronistic stance that further destabilizes our notions of contemporary life. In Another One Bites the Dust, Yu Hong borrows images of people, mostly women and children, in writhing poses expressing mental anguish or imminent physical danger, both real and fantastical, from the internet and social media. Set against a gold ground and shaped as large tondos or arched panels, the figures presented confront and upend the epic themes of sacred art while not shying away from the role of painting to portray the sorrows of the human condition. The works in the exhibition upend the epic themes of sacred art while embracing painting’s capacity to portray the human condition—the sorrows, absurdities, and transcendence of bodily existence. The large tondo paintings Birth (2022) and Death (2022) are set against a gold ground: a newborn held by a doctor’s prophylactic gloves and connected to its mother by an umbilical cord will be paired across the nave with the bare feet of several cadavers. The exhibition’s centerpiece will be a ten-part painting, Walking through Life (2019–22), suspended as a semicircle in the choir. Progressing from left to right, each arched panel depicts a scene of different physical stages of life as conditioned and contorted by social norms, gender roles, and political realities."-- Website Lisson Gallery."@en
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