Duchamp said his life was his best art.

I say my art is my best life.

This is my concept.

Yu Youhan in Landscape of Yi Meng Shan 2004


Yu Youhan (*1943 in Shanghai) is one of the most significant and idiosyncratic painters working in China today, yet his career has by no means been confined to a singular painting style. Since the early 1970s Yu Youhan has experimented with a wide range of styles and subject matter, bringing together imagery from contradictory or unexpected sources, both historical and contemporary, and using a variety of different painterly techniques. In fact Yu Youhan's artistic diversity, and his resistance to any form of categorization, has been seen as the only consistent theme in his work.

Having graduated from The Central Academy of Art & Design, Beijng, in 1970, Yu Youhan turned to a preoccupation with abstract art in 1979. He became a central figure in circles of experimental art in Shanghai in the mid 1980s, when he was teaching at the Shanghai School of Arts & Crafts. He was first associated with a development of Shanghai Minimalism, and at the end of the 1980s, with the emergence of Political Pop. His oeuvre is a vast repository of knowledge and circumstances, a collage of different painting styles and subject matter. His subjects range from the decorative (depoliticized propaganda images embellished with floral patterns), through images with personal ramifications (figurative portraits and landscapes), to images acted out on purely aesthetic levels (abstract paintings). The works express a de-centering, moving backwards and forwards between allusive and partial references to history, emotions, and feelings, tiny details of everyday life, elements of popular culture and national identities. Herein lies a clue to Yu Youhan's methodology. He has flattened out the hierarchy of the genres of painting that exist within his own practice.

The change in Yu Youhan's current work is arresting. Having turned away from the bright world of popularized imagery already circulating in the public sphere, Yu Youhan's recent painting reveals a more muted, personally exploratory body of work. It is darker in tone and more introspective in mood. It is no less socially analytical but more searchingly compassionate. The painting now seeks to establish wider relationships with Chinese history, on longer timescales per se. It is perhaps possible to consider this work as building an idiosyncratic genre of history painting, on a very different basis from official, celebratory art – a kind of 'zero point of expression' – a pairing back to recover the fundamental moral orientation of an art that can serve society meaningfully.


The present publication provides an opportunity to see Yu Youhan's paintings in all its variety, from the early abstract works, through the increasing complexity of his painted surfaces, to the sheer beauty of his recent work. With such dexterity, Yu Youhan's work will continually subvert any attempt to trace a neat line of development. His art is elusive and, for many people, even enthusiasts of contemporary art, unfathomable. Arranged broadly chronologically, the publication features focused groups of related paintings from critical periods and some of the artist's series and cycles of paintings. By presenting the cycles, or by bringing together groups that were worked on in parallel, one can experience how even small shifts in subject and sensibility define his practice and illuminate his meaning. We need to view Yu Youhan's entire oeuvre as an act of remembrance, flitting as it does in its subject matter from the significant and collective to the incidental and individual.

Yu Youhan's strategy involves a knowing oscillation between realism, abstraction, and gesture. The challenge for Yu Youhan, and his achievement, has been to create paintings that have a meaningful existence in the aftermath of modernist painting's solipsistic practice. He has done this in a distinctly quiet manner, one that echoes an ancient Chinese sensibility.

Yu Youhan has long held a position of high esteem in China, but he is less well known internationally than other major artists of his generation. This monograph is therefore an exciting opportunity to bring the work of one of the most compelling living artists to a broader public and to evaluate the breath of his achievement pursued over time with concentration and singularity.

The visual complexity of these paintings is matched by their thematic obscurity. One thing is certain, however: to whatever degree Yu Youhan's formal devices may resemble those of Western precedents, he does not mean the same things by them.Differences in context have significant bearing. As has been pointed out, modernity as a concept describes a situation of dislocation. Within Chinese contemporary art, avant-garde art is probably the most typical example of dislocation. The logic of the historical linear development of modern and postmodern art in the West may become reversed, mixed, dislocated, and composite in the case of China.Yu Youhan's oevre in its entirety is a visually adequate example of this transformation.


ABSTRACTIONS


Art excludes the unnecessary.

Carl Andre in Preface to Stripe Painting (Frank Stella), 1959


Yu Youhan's non-figurative art from the 1970s up until today demonstrates the inadequacy of the conventional opposition between abstraction and representation: The artist approaches painting in ways that renders a modernist vocabulary insufficient, not because that vocabulary is unable to deal with the marks on the surface of his abstract pictures at the level of description, but because it is quite unequipped to contend with their contingencies at the level of meaning. This gap between description and meaning is widened in the recent (2007-2010) abstract work. He seems to have come full circle to a form of abstraction that either expresses or mimics the nuance of surface which the modernist vocabulary was designed to describe. By doing this, Yu Youhan's work contradicts not only what we think we know, but also what we think we see – or rather, to be more accurate, renders the relation 'seeing' and 'knowing' slippery and unstable.

For thirty years, and with unfaltering inventiveness, his paintings have appeared in successive series, never repetitive, always surprising. And yet, while Yu Youhan's work precludes anything that could be construed as a brand or a label or a signature, while it eschews any iconography or 'personal mythology,' there are a few other works as instantly recognizable as his. One could say that Yu Youhan's painting is a deployment of multiplicities. His abstract non-figurative work forces us to confront colors without the mediating effect of form. More specifically, the forms that do make their appearance on his canvases are often compliments of the distribution of colors. The many different strokes, braids, grids, whirls, and interlaced forms that fill his canvases are not motifs designed to help organize the surface of the painting; they do not make up a repertoire or a reserve of available silhouettes that can be used to motivate the canvas' surface. Yu Youhan doesn't subordinate the application of color, the over/under of painting. While looking at a Yu Youhan work, especially the circular paintings of 1986 and 2008, the viewer cannot help but mentally reconstruct the painting process, attempting to determine its instances (surface/ground), calculating the priority and order of its layers (before/after), retracing its chronological sequence – in short, producing a mental image of the work's process.Yu Youhan often acts like a strategist, who is able to let the situation unfold after carefully laying out its premise, and who, instead of imposing a desired effect, lets it occur without interruption, lets it deposit its sediment. There are no heroic pictorial gestures in his work, but rather a reflection on efficacy, a concern for what Chinese philosophers call the "propensity of things" – the painter is not the originator of the work but an agent, putting forces into play. Here, the depersonalizing aspect of Yu Youhan's work can be described as using expressionist techniques (bold painting strokes, drips) non-expressionistically.

None of his art lacks an emotional charge; rather, it eliminates emotional histrionics in order to enhance a base of sensation, of feeling.Yu Youhan's non-figurative work can be summed up as a fusion of mark, space, and image – the painting itself becomes the reality. Instead of proposing industrial products as models of modern art, à la Duchamp, Yu Youhan demonstrates in his artistic practice what a different way an expressive anonymity and simplicity can look like. This, per se, is not always evident because painting is something extremely elaborate and sophisticated, something that refers back to a whole history of painting. It is an accumulation of history in a culture constantly destroying the past.Yu Youhan denies neither side of the paradox, accepting it as the way in which art is already part of life. Whether beginning from nature or not, at a certain point his paintings become painting; it assumes a formal aspect, its reality.

Mixed (and usually muted) colors may dominate Yu Youhan's non-figurative work, but, like many artists, he has done his 'red, yellow, and blue' paintings. Explicit primaries appear in, for example, Untitled (1986) and Untitled (1986). For his painting Untitled (2008) he combines a number of chromatic colors, moving the mixture toward a unifying grayish, brownish tone. It remains unclear whether the point of this effort is to generate these subtle grays and browns (color becoming neutralized) or to render the chromatic range all the more complex and full, since each component insistently reemerges from the neutralizing mix. The effect of color and line in Yu Youhan's late abstract paintings tends to be slightly restrained. In many instances his compositional divisions are only barely off-center and his colors seem to sit on the edge of the divide between chromatics and neutrals. Despite Yu Youhan's non-expressionistically techniques and despite his precision and symmetry, he often enhances the works by leaving narrow strip of painting drips and smears, representing successive applications of component pigments – an index or history of the painting.

It is revelatory to set the 3-12-2007 A1-3 (2007) paintings next to 1984 1-2 (1984) paintings, and to observe the shift from a stringent geometric form to an open-form framework; from verticals, horizontals, and bands to organic curves, and splashes; from the rectilinear structure of Western art and architecture to the measured naturalism of Eastern calligraphy. Yet while he has explored both gestural and geometric approaches to abstraction, his underlying motivations bear little relationship to those of the early modernists. He mostly avoids primary colors and instead uses shades of gray, brown, and black. In a series of five paintings from 1986, works of exceptional authority and grace, all measuring 109x79 cm, Yu Youhan systematically explores color using a set of predetermined variations. With a palette of what deceptively appear to the viewer's eye to be only two or three colors – cream, red, and black, for instance – the artist generates compositions that balance vivacity and stillness.

In Yu Youhan's abstract cycles of work (1984-1986) and (2007-2010) the viewer may notice a preoccupation with 'marking' that emerges in curves and curls, twisting lines and folds with their genesis more in nature than in art. He suggests the disciplined, rhythmic marks of Asian calligraphy and the restrained and evocative poetry of the eighth-century Chinese poet Han Shan, whose writings seem to have indirectly influenced Yu Youhan's work. Such restrain is especially evident in his 2008 works, in which dancing marks of black and gray play over a delicate beige-colored backdrop, seeming at times on the verge of dissolution. Here his art speaks in the color of early Chinese landscape art: cloud whites, foliage greens, mountain-rock reds and grays, tree-trunk and earth browns, sky and water blues. These colors drawn from nature are usually painted as if viewed from a distance, through the haze and mist of time. Similarly, sometimes Yu Youhan's late paintings are so restrained in color as to be essentially monochrome.Every brushstroke rests on the plane; there is an up-and-down orientation to the composition but no in-and-out, no perception of recession into distant space. Everything we see is as close to the surface as it can possibly be, meeting the most rigorous criteria for the best modernist painting. However, the pictures do not negate and empty out meaning.

Through the last decade, Yu Youhan seems to be searching, experimenting, and testing formal issues. The paintings show both dense and opaque sedimentations; twisted, even contorted patterns, nearly mazelike in places, stretched and thinning linear elements. These are paintings with the ease and eloquence evident in the linear arabesques of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning even more than the intensity and layering of Jackson Pollock. The surface, Yu Youhan's sacred plane, is notably assertive in all the late work. The physical experience of his art is an important element in a gradual comprehension of his trajectory. These are paintings in which the drags of color across the surface of the canvas reflect their very making. One may observe that, unlike Pollock, where gravity is suspended in a skein of threads, Yu Youhan frequently allows the pull of the earth to shape the flow of his paint. We dispense with considerations of figure and ground; there is no illusion of depth and recession in space. There is no significant distinction between foreground and background. There is only the plane. The viewer must accept a certain disjunction between visual information and intellectual understanding – must see multiple layers of color on a particular ground color, and several linear elements interweaving and overlapping, yet also see that the ground and the linear elements inhabit a single plane. In such layering of sensation, expression and experience lies the beauty and the poetry of Yu Youhan's vision.


LANDSCAPES


To paint from nature is not to copy what is objective;

It is to realize one's sensations.

We must again become classicists by way of nature,

That is to say, by sensation.

Paul Cezanne in "Cezanne's Pursuit," Partisan Review, 1989



Yu Youhan's representations of the outdoors provide us with important insights. For one thing, landscapes always reveal underlying concepts, both personal and general, about nature and its relation to humanity. Like all forms of representation, landscape painting is to some degree symbolic; no matter how naturalistic an artist makes it, the visionary element is present. Yu Youhan's images of nature embody a sense of personal rootedness and pride of place. His beautifully balanced Yi Meng Shen I – VI (2002) demonstrate his mastery of possibilities for landscape structure and effects as applied to the familiar territory of his home region. Its panoramic view emphasizes the grandeur of the valley and includes a compendium of elements – cliffs, valley, trees, dwellings and sky. The consolidation Yu Youhan finds in these scenes from his home territory is expressed through a sense of warmth and familiarity that arises from his combination of informal technical execution and realism of effect. He makes it possible for us to know these places by enabling us to experience them through physical and emotional directness rather than through the more intellectual – and less immediate – and more narrative-like process of scrutiny that would have been imposed by a more precisely linear style.

Studying Yu Youhan's late landscape paintings is different. It is less a matter of trying to discern a line of development than of studying the many directions in which his explorations and believes take him. Here, his art not only reaches an intensity of hue, sureness of touch, freshness of color use, and invention in treatment of surface, that surpasses the achievements of any of his previous work; it also reveals – in landscape – an ever-deepening tension between his attachments to the givens of vision and the needs of logical representation. Looking at the culminating landscape of Yi Meng Shan means studying the complex means by which the motif's surface, shape, space, and color are integrated. In essence, the vehicle for the integrations is the patch of color. By degrees the patch becomes more and more abstract in appearance, yet it continues to translate and represent his passionate and patient observation. If is seems a paradox to speak in the same breath of an intense study of nature and of increasingly abstract devices for representing it, it is a paradox for Yu Youhan himself: "He obviously wanted to balance something unbalanced with a close access to tradition. With a rush of real emotions, these landscapes didn't turn into conceptual symbols or images."Each painting attacks the landscape as a fresh challenge. The aggregate runs from a mere vibration of color on the horizon, its translucent profile echoing the pale green of the foreground vegetation. There, all is displacement. Instead of an imaginary object, surrounded by impressionist transparency, every part of the surface is a continuum – a field of resistant form. Nothing is empty in Yu Youhan's landscapes, not even the bits of untouched canvas. This organized dialectic of shape and of color is like an echo of Cezanne's famous remark of realizing ones sensation by painting from nature. To realize a sensation means to give it a syntax, and as the planes of the landscape become less legible as illusion, so does the force of their pictorial language become more ordered. Here, Yu Youhan's goal is presence, not illusion. The seeming impulsiveness of his non-figurative paintings has given way to a patient, disciplined search for harmony of form and color. Every brushstroke is like a building block, firmly placed within the pictorial architecture which creates a subtle balance. The colors are deliberately controlled so as to create chords of warm and cool tones that reverberate throughout the canvas. For all the stability of the countryside, the scenes are alive with movement.


The problem that preoccupies Yu Youhan in his landscape paintings is that of translating volume and distance to a flat surface without denying its flatness. Yu Youhan focuses on tactile, blocklike brushstrokes as a means of affirming the painting's tactility, flatness, and even its rectangular format, and sees them as crucial to the self-reflexive quality and that situates his art in continuum with his contemporaneous non-figurative paintings. The structural use of color, the repeated working of contours, his ability to rhythmically synchronizing volumes and building forms in terms of color planes are key to this color synthesis of line as well as form.The fields are alive with oscillations between brown and green touches, and even shimmer from the light violet dabs that compliments them. Probably because the motifs are so simple, Yu Youhan emphasizes the tension built up by color differences between adjacent touches. The touch itself it quite free: Yu Youhan's emphasis is on pulsating areas of varying hue within a single surface, rather than on parallel ordering. It is a vision in which form is primary, however rendered. Volume is defined by color, density and sparseness are carefully balanced, and color equilibrium achieved all without the parallel touch.

Yu Youhan's landscape is permeated by concrete reality in an abstracted space, that is, a reality composed of detachable appearance; the painting remains painterly, and does not necessarily represent the 'look' of the seamless surface of realism. To say that he treats reality as an aggregate of images is not to say that he paints it with neutrality, or with pure aesthetic distance, or without commitment.All landscapes are painted 'as a remove', distanced from the artist's present circumstances. The scattered perspective hints something complicated and unknown melted with the invariant land of his native landscape.



FRAGMENTATION – MAO


A picture is a model of reality.

Whether it is true of false.

Ludwig Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921


It has been frequently noted that fragmentation characterizes both modernist and postmodernist art movements in the West. Fragmentation is also an important concept in twentieth-century Chinese art, but its implication, and hence the notion of the modern and the postmodern must be understood in relation to China's cultural tradition and political experience.It should be emphasized that the Chinese interest in the fragmentation of language had its indigenous origin in the Cultural Revolution. That decade produced innumerable copies of a few sets of images and texts – mainly Mao's portraits, his writings, and his sayings.Although Yu Youhan was one of the first creators of abstract, non-representational art in China, he is more famous for his later Pop Art-influenced paintings incorporating iconography from the Cultural Revolution period, especially the image of Mao Zedong. Unlike his successors, Yu Youhan was strongly influenced by Maoist ideology and has always maintained that art should be made for and reflect the lives of the Chinese people.The chief technologies of cultural production during that period were repetition and duplication – two essential methods used to fill up a huge time/space with limited images and words, thereby creating a coercive, homogenous verbal and visual language in a most static form. In addition to written characters, other material for repetition and duplication during the Cultural Revolution – including Mao's portraits, typical images in propaganda posters, and the color red – was reduced to isolated and hence illogical fragments. These forms were extracted from the original process of production and reproduction, distorted at wish for any possible formalist or ideological reason, and mixed with signs from heterogeneous sources. Such practices have become so common in Chinese art since the 1980s that they transcend any differences between individual (e.g., Political Pop, Cynical Realism) and actually unite these trends into a single movement. The basic means and goals of this art were to recycle and transform the visual language of the Cultural Revolution. But with the Cultural Revolution gradually receding into the past, images derived from this era were used less for political criticism and increasingly more for visual, intellectual, or even commercial purposes. From the middle to the late eighties, images 'fragmented' from the Cultural Revolution repertory still provided definite references to their prototypes. But gradually such references were complicated and disguised. Works of Political Pop, arguably the predominant trend in the early and mid-nineties, did not simply cite and deface Cultural Revolution images but also distorted them and combined them with signs from heterogeneous sources. Although largely mixing and appropriating existing images, these works should not be simply equated with "pastiches", because in these works the Cultural Revolution images still remain central.

Yu Youhan had begun his unique style of using printed fabric in the early '90s to depict Mao Zedong, as seen in Zhaoshou (Big Wave). The random patterns in the painting almost look like inferior local handicrafts, but based on Yu Youhan's vast experience with abstractionism, those boorish patterns demonstrated his skilfulness and subtlety. Yu Youhan can be claimed as the most gifted of all the Political Pop artists. As he discussed: "I paint Mao Zedong in order to reflect China, history, and also the life that I experienced. But as an artist, these reflections are always visualized in my practice. The Chinese Economic Reform by Deng Xiaoping brought Chinese artists liberty, which allowed me to appropriate the image of Mao Zedong, the most important character in China's modern history, in my paintings. Both my childhood and youth were spent in the Mao era, and I also experienced the Cultural Revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, China was filled with Mao's images. More than a decade after the death of Mao, I decided to revisit Mao in my art practice. When I painted floral patterns all over Mao's monochrome uniform in his standard portrait, I was pleased unprecedentedly. The words that had been suppressed for over ten years in my heart were finally expressed in full on the canvas. Mao's image in my painting consists of a variety of meanings: Mao sometimes represents China, sometimes represents the East, sometimes represents culture; sometimes he is a leader, sometimes an avant-garde, sometimes a conservative, and sometimes indeed, only a series of decorative patterns."


Painters in China today bear a dual historical burden. Behind them lies an indigenous tradition of almost unimaginable length and complexity, while thrust upon them is a foreign art history that culminates in a set of 'modern' techniques. Accordingly, issues of formal beauty, abstraction, representation, intuition, reason and expressiveness paired with superb technical facility, are all immanent features in Yu Youhan's work. He has worked with various postwar traditions of process and gesture, most notably accumulated in the series Foreign Maos (2005). He applies the resources of painting with the greatest possible directness, and is able to muster a diverse wealth of references and discursive formations. Indeed, the very oppositions and inner contradictions of painting's history allow these to become points of departure for pictorial discovery. He similarly endeavors to mediate between subjective and historical experience.


An obliterating floral motif runs through the 1990s work of Yu Youhan, whose standing or sitting figures of Mao become little more than an organizing shape amid a flurry of conflicting patterns. The Great Leader, once routinely depicted at the forefront of struggle, is now subsumed by a quasi-psychedelic background. In Yu Youhan's fabric-like works, and in those by many artists to follow, the chairman, gone but not forgotten, lingers on deprived of iconographic dominance. Yu Youhan's use of decorative and floral patterns investigates the age-old topos of painting as wallpaper, as mere living-room adornment. Some of these works produce an inexorably claustrophobic allover, conveying a sense of the uncanny that often escalates into horror vacui. In contrast to these spreading patterns of floral, other pieces form delicate garlands, which in their unpretentious loveliness make the dispute between high art and decoration, between avant-garde and kitsch, seem nothing more than trifling. The man who was the living embodiment of China has been reduced to a marker for a bygone political era, to be manipulated with impunity. Although largely mixing and appropriating existing images, these works should not be simply equated with "pastiches", because in these works the Cultural Revolution images still remain central.

In this regard, Yu Youhan has entered the discourse of painting's transition period – not in order to forget or conquer painting, but to make the fault lines and boundaries of its historical polemic productive. Yu Youhan pairs existential involvement with an unconditional surrender to cliché and commodity. This is an expression of deliberate ambiguity. Yu Youhan generates an encounter between disparate fragments of meaning – an experience that is divided between alienation and authenticity. He has worked with the various postwar traditions of process and gesture, albeit in reduced fashion. His works concentrate on familiar and coded expressive devices: abstract lines, splatters, decorative patterns, dripping paint, over-painting. Although he applies the resources of painting with the greatest possible directness, Yu Youhan is able to muster a diverse wealth of references and discursive formations. Indeed, the very concision with which he locates the reputed dead ends, oppositions, and inner contradictions of painting's history allows these to become points of departure for pictorial discovery. His work draw myriad connections painterly surfaces and forms, and between the individual mark and mass media reproduction.

Despite Yu Youhan's de-constructivist trait in his Mao paintings, their thematic integrity and stylistic wholeness should not be overlooked. Both of these traits are characteristic of classical Modernism, an ideological construction of the pictorial that Yu has stringently renounced.It is true, however, that one of the fascinations of Yu's work is how different various pictures look from one another. Compare, for example XX. Both from XX, but both very different, seeming to assume radically different ideas of pictorial integrity. It is not the use of multiple styles, but the fact that various styles are consistently strong. There is a consistency of sensibility lurking behind them.If art is a way of thinking about reality, then Yu Youhan's oeuvre may strike us as double-edged. On the one hand it does clearly involve structures of contradiction that suggest a generally skeptical stance toward meaning; but on the other hand it shows a deep commitment to human life and its potential.

While acknowledging painting's absolute contingency, Yu Youhan pushes the medium forward with a unique admixture of skepticism and faith, and that may be the only conviction that he can have.



CONCLUSION


I need to go in a new direction now.

Yu Youhan in Landscape of Yi Meng Shen 2004


In his entire oeuvre, Yu Youhan takes up the basis of a conflict, namely the friction between literalness and transcendence, painterly substance and optical immateriality, illusion and reality. In his paintings that range from abstraction, impressionism, and pop art, he exposes the contradictions and problems of modernism. However, he leaves these contradictions open instead of bringing them into a new synthesis.In this regard, Yu Youhan has entered the discourse of painting's transition period – not in order to forget or conquer painting, but, in part, to make the fault lines and boundaries of its historical polemic productive. This is an expression of deliberate ambiguity. Here, expression is intended neither to resuscitate nor to parody the previous conceptions of an autonomously imagined subject. Instead, Yu Youhan generates an encounter between disparate fragments of meaning – an experience that is divided between alienation and authenticity.

Yu Youhan's work has finally reached a point, it seems, at which it has made visible the polarizations of contemporary painting. The latest non-figurative series of paintings (2008-2010) represents a plateau in Yu Youhan's work, the culmination of three decades of striving. The work seem to be centered at T.S. Eliot's "still point of the turning world," a place where cerebration and passion commingle. The paintings are open and comfortably contained at the same time; they are both austere and generous. The repressed paradoxes and contingencies of painting's history become the preconditions of the development of new images. When one is faced with a painting by Yu Youhan, the question of the end of painting become obsolete, since this artist has integrated the very implications and consequences of both illusion and reality into a more comprehensive concept of the image. Moving between figuration and abstraction, pop and pathos, Yu Youhan has seemed to cultivate an ambiguity between these polarities in his paintings. However, these apparent paradoxes and indeterminacies ultimately form a coherent aesthetic. In 1986 16 and 1986 21 and other formative works from the 1980s and early 1990s, Yu Youhan establishes certain constants of his painterly vocabulary: an organizational structure that relies on an underlying geometric system ranging from incised gridded backgrounds to repetitions of like elements; an oscillation between flatness and depth, abstraction and representation.

Yu Youhan is unusually susceptible to pictures with an acute awareness of so many different images and visual forms. His work utilizes photographs, snapshots, graphic motifs, his own drawings, and the work of other artists as points of origin. From these diverse sources, his works may further draw upon art historical styles ranging from appropriation art to abstraction, and encompass (and sometimes subvert) genres of portraiture and landscape. Or his paintings and drawings might not refer to any preexisting image, but are derived instead from the artist's own imagination or an episodic personal memory. Overriding everything, ultimately, is Yu Youhan's interrogation of painting's capabilities. In his hands, the medium is a potent means of exploring how and what the eyes see. Looking at his paintings, one often may acknowledge a bit of formal or symbolic shorthand and intuitively fill in the blanks with what remains. Pictures fluctuate between abstraction and representation, though what is shown is often more symbolic than literal. However much the object or subject of the painting disappears, painting itself is always the constant, the thing that one always sees. Even when he has derived a composition from another medium, Yu Youhan's paintings amount to approximations of the images to which they refer, very often taking narrative or representation to the realm of ideation.


"In my art I strive to reflect the people of China, their spirits, sufferings, longings and pursuits in a critical moment of rapid change and transition. The lyrics of the Chinese National Anthem state: 'The Chinese nation has come to a most dangerous moment.' This lyric is now sixty years old and I believe it still reflects China's contemporary reality. Today in China, people are confronted by globalization of Western culture. The only way for China to meet this challenge is to work hard to integrate the best aspects of both Western and Chinese culture. In my art I strive to reflect my understanding of the essence of contemporary China. In my painting I endeavour to eliminate various styles, using only the simplest methods to represent the common person in an unselfconscious state. The people are the basis of China's future." Yu Youhan in interview with Francis Maravillas, 2001.

Gao Minglu, "Particular Time, Specific Place, and the Truth of Mine" in Modernity Documenta 12 Magazine, p. 179.

Whereas modern art in China over the last sixty years has struggled to 'catch up' with Western modern art, reflecting a certain time dimension in its thinking about that relationship, recent art seeks to establish a dialogue, if not a co-existence, with Western modern art, reflecting more of a spatial dimension with regard to this relationship.

The formal roots of contemporary abstraction can be found in its early split onto two different paths, one based on geometric forms and the other on organic ones. In their initial articulations, these approaches pointed to two very different visions of the nature of ultimate realities, though such sharp distinctions began to blur in the hands of subsequent practitioners. Theories of postmodernism further undermined any remaining belief in purity or in abstract art's special relationship to spirituality or universal being. Recent literature on abstraction is full of equivocations, references to 'endgame' strategies, and pessimistic discussions about the death of modernism. A crucial ingredient in the Abstract Expressionist ideal of self-realizations on canvas had been some form of resolution, transforming inner chaos and conflict into a highly charged but ultimately balanced wholeness that invited neither subtraction nor addition. Yet, Yu Yuhan's accumulated brushstrokes imply no such drama – his abstract art flourishes. The decisiveness of the pictures thus does not come from muscular architecture or bold lyric flow, but from a refusal of those standard graces. Because the inner self was understood to be darkly conflicted, a certain density and gravity were expected in 'serious' painting. The spindly lightness that Yu Youhan's work maintain, again belie the depth, insist on the complexities of overlay on the surface. With their layers of overlapping marks, the series XXX subsume individual moments of expression into dense accumulations. Appropriately, the maturing abstract style emerged not out of some linear, progressive development in Yu Youhan's work, but from a back-and-forth interweaving of contradictory impulses. The XXX paintings are pulpier and more organic than anything he had done before.

Additionally, the brushwork recalls that of Wei Heng's innovative style called Si Ti Shu Shi (calligraphic forces of the four script). Wei Heng (AD 252-291) identified writing with the patterns of dynamic forces in nature, thereby making a correlation between the order of the cosmos and that of the human. Yu Youhan's marks connote the essence of the forms he depicts and the ideas those promote. The awakening of the individual in relation to the collective whole as well as to nature itself, present in Zen practices such as calligraphy, mirrors the role Yu Youhan holds in his own art making. The notion that art imitates life, or vice versa, is of consequence in his work: He is committed and he is aware of the complexity of things. Without seeming to edify, he takes into account that there are always different viewpoints, depending on the individual's personal situation or the point in time. History is a collection of different ways of seeing. Collectively, his abstract work builds on both formal and substantial opposites: intuitive drawing versus deliberate structuring, subjective emotion versus analytical concept. And so one might conclude that these particular works draw a line under the conflict that raged in the 1960s between the subjectivity and autonomous gesturality of Abstract Expressionism on the one hand and the depersonalized, analytical strategies of Conceptual Art on the other.Here Yu Youhan's work unites two approaches that seemed utterly incompatible forty years ago: physical-sensual expressiveness and socially relevant reflection.

However, the significance of these works is only partly explained by their physical presence. It lies also in their abstraction of mood and feeling, in their frequent illusion of the conditions of the natural world. They compel us to use our own senses to complete the sentence of experience.

Zhao Chuan Yu Youhan and his mountains in Yu Youhan Landscape of Yi Meng Shen, 2004.

Op.cit.: We cannot interpret Chinese avant-garde art as merely the context of antagonism between modernism and postmodernism, but neither is it merely the result of China's local art environment in the 1980s. The appearance of Chinese avant-garde art should be interpreted within twentieth-century Chinese art, which is the fundamental background of modernity in Chinese art. The Chinese avant-garde art that appeared in the 1980s was actually the inevitable result of the avant-garde art of the 1930s avant-garde art mixed with Western Dadaism, traditional Zen, the rebel sense of the revolutionary masses in the Mao Zedong era, and the social responsibilities of literati and officialdom.

In 1942 Mao Zedong declared that art and literature should serve the people – that is, be readily comprehensible and morally salutary. Some thirty years later, with the closing of most art academies during the anti-intellectual frenzy of the Cultural Revolution, many artists were sent to do menial labor in the countryside, while others were assigned to create propagandistic paintings, big-character posters, or newsletter illustrations. Many artists who had lived through the war years gladly adopted the prescribed realist imagery – showing the grim life before Mao's victory and the glorious hope since – because such a program matched their own experience of China. When the art academies reopened in the late 1970s, the choice facing student painters was again between Chinese-ink stylization and Soviet-style oil on canvas representation. Both were well taught, and admission standards were high. Ultimately, with the burgeoning of Mao's personality cult, one portrait image dominated all others and appeared in virtually every public venue: the bland and enigmatic visage of the Great Leader himself. With the onset of the '85 New Wave movement, a number of artists began to toy with the face of Mao, previously a sacrosanct image. Andy Warhol, it should be remembered, had painted Mao from photographs in 1972, shortly after Nixon's visit to China in 1973, he did a large series of multicolored silk-screens. These images were well known to artists in the PRC by the mid 1980s, after Deng Xiaoping's Open Door policy led to a massive wave of foreign information.

"I like to express my thoughts through images of Mao Zedong. I have also painted other subjects, such as the Chinese currency, the renminbi; bicycles; playing cards; and abstract works, the 'Circle' series. The reason I have chosen Mao as a favorite subject is because he is a popular character, both among Chinese and Westerners. I myself consider him a legendary figure worth depicting. During the Cultural Revolution, portraits of Mao were deified: they exuded a feeling of political passion and cultureless superstition. Mao advocates getting rid of the 'Four Old Principles'. He opposed the use of the dragon and phoenix pattern, which to him was a symbol of the blind worship of the monarchy… My goal is to depict the figure of Mao in a new light." Yu Youhan, 2000

Lu Peng, A History of Contemporary Chinese Art: 1990-1999. Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2000, p. 175.