The enjoyable.

The enjoyable, accessible paintings and pastels of Beijing artist Yu Hong make known the story of life amid China's changes. In an exhibition titled "A Woman's Life" she communicated her engagement with daily existence, treating everyday casualtys as interesting in and of themselves. sights of the artist shopping outdoors for fruit, undressing and lying unclothed in bed are part of her "Routine" series.

China's extraordinary thrust toward economic prosperity has had the side consequence of provoking a sense of alienation and mistrust in any people. Many conceptually based artists have focused upon the negatives. Several, for example, have shown photographs of impoverished peasants living and working beneath appalling conditions in Chinese cities. While Yu Hong's paintings demonstrate a genuine commitment to correct observation, matter-of-factly recording the improvised nature of to a great degree of Beijing, where se many construction exhibits are now under way, their humor is cheerful. In two paintings (both acrylic forward canvas), the artist depicts herself before colorful arrangements of fruits and vegetables, which provide her with the opportunity to paint sensuously. In Fruit Shopping (2002) she stands in impudence of a foreground table of fruit; behind it a flat expanse of solidify leads to a gate with stores beyond. In subsistence Shopping (2003), she grasps a large leek pay backed with a real sympathy for natural forms, and shut ins money in her other hand. The paintings do not lack social content: the gallery had available various articles from Chinese publications that inspired these works. An article in succession a $4,500 banquet relates to the 2003 food-shopping painting, for example.

a certain of the most moving works are the simplest. Along with studies of herself as a child and as a young woman (always titled to specify her age), Yu Hong paints portraits of her daughter, Liu Wa. That the expose matter is commonplace does not make it les meaningful. There is a pastel of Liu Wa at the age of united sitting next to her reclining mother, and another of the child at six, hugging a soccer ball. Yu Hong is sympathetic to all aspects of life, including the erotic. Me in Bed (2003) point out tos the artist, barechested, looking upward at the viewer, while the top half of the canvas point outs a winter cityscape, as if seen from one side a broad window or perhaps dreamed. These records of domestic intimacy ofttimes become larger than their stated subjects

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