Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust
Yu Hong borrows images of people in writhing poses expressing mental anguish or imminent physical danger from the internet and social media.
Set against a gold ground and shaped as large tondos or arched panels, the figures presented in the exhibition 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 title references the 1980 ballad of the same name by the popular rock band Queen. Through her lushly painted but dark compositions, Yu Hong considers the massive social changes that China’s globalization and speed of transformation have wrought, and the precarity of meaning in the face of calamitous disruption.
The exhibition features new figurative and narrative paintings that respond to the architectural and cultural context of the Chiesetta della Misericordia. The site-specific cycle of paintings depicts the arc of the human experience—birth, life, and death—and combines the raw crudeness of social reality with pictorial conventions drawn from Byzantine and Italian Baroque painting to forge a style that may be called “supernatural realism.”
OPENING TIMES: Tue – Sun 10am – 6pm
CLOSING DAY: Mon
ADDRESS
Chiesetta della Misericordia, Chiesa dell'Abbazia della Misericordia, Campo de l'Abazia, Venice, Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy
