Yu Youhan (Shanghai: 3030 Press-ShanghArt Gallery, 2015): a Summary

The monograph Yu Youhan provides a comprehensive theorized analysis of the life and work of the historically important Shanghai-based painter Yu Youhan (b. 1943). The book, which was produced in close collaboration with the artist, contains a foreword by the acclaimed BAFTA award-winning writer and television film maker Matthew Collings as well as an extended critical essay, ‘Yu Youhan: the (Dis-)placed Literatus’, by Paul Gladston, Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham. It is richly illustrated with colour reproductions of works representing the varied styles of painting adopted and developed by Yu as a mature artist since the early 1970s.

Gladston’s essay is in five parts. The first part is an introduction situating Yu’s work as a mature artist in relation to the wider contexts of the development of western(ized) modernist, postmodernist and contemporary art, and of socialist realist, modern (xiandai) and contemporary (dangdai) art within the People’s Republic of China. Provisional comparisons are drawn between Yu’s stylistically varied output and that of the exemplary postmodernist painter Gerhard Richter, both of which are characterized by continual shifts between figuration and abstraction. Reception of Yu’s so-called ‘Political Pop’ paintings in international and localized Chinese art world contexts alongside those of his contemporary Wang Guangyi is also discussed. The introduction concludes with a description of the methodology used to gather and analyse data for the book.

The next three parts present a chronological narrative of Yu’s development as a painter based on interviews with the artist as well as other primary and secondary sources, many of which were accessed from the artist’s personal archive. The narrative discusses Yu’s development as a painter in relation to his personal biography and the wider conditions of artistic production and reception during the twentieth and twenty-first century. It includes close reference to published and unpublished statements by Yu alongside detailed discussion of changing political, social, cultural and economic circumstances both within and outside China. Close attention is also paid to the techniques and materials used by Yu in the production of his work.

The final part presents a theorized analysis of Yu’s work as an artist. This analysis deploys two related concepts appropriated from Hal Foster’s critical analysis of the western(ized) historical and neo- avant-gardes, Return of the Real (1996): first, parallax, that is to say, changes in the appearance of an object relative to shifts in the position of its observer; and second, deferred action, delayed reconstruction of past events perceived as traumatic. The first of these concepts is used with reference to statements by Yu and the wider conditions of artistic production and reception within and outside China to argue that his work cannot be defined simply from a western(ized) postmodernist cultural point of view, but is also open to interpretation as the outcome of a divergent desire to arrive at states of formal harmony and expressions of essential localized identity resonant with the artist’s readings of traditional Chinese cultural thought and practice. The second concept is used to support a reading of Yu’s Political Pop paintings as an attempt to reconstruct the traumatic events of the Cultural Revolution by drawing critical attention to what Yu asserts is the largely unrealized potential of the Maoist era for personal self-actualization and freedom of expression. It also supports a wider genealogical reading that sees Yu’s work as a whole and its relationship to Chinese tradition as an attempt to reconcile two further historical traumas: disruption to the continuity of traditional modes of painting by the development of modernism in China during the early twentieth century; and the seminal emergence of high-cultural literati ink and brush painting as a consequence of the expulsion of scholars from the imperial court by Mongolian invaders during the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). Yu’s work is interpreted in this regard as an attempt to uphold the continuity of painting as high-cultural free expression in the face of persistently interruptive historical traumas and, therefore, a serially (dis-)placed manifestation of the traces of China’s literati traditions.


Paul Gladston – January 2016

YU YOUHAN
Publisher: 3030Press (2015)
Monograph, English
Clothbound hardcover, 248 pages, 222 illustrations including 190 colour plates, 255 x 318 mm
ISBN: 978-989-99384-9-9

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