Pioneering Chinese Artist Yu Youhan Dies at 80
Yu was in the first cohort of Chinese artists to show at the Venice Biennale, but his practice evolved far beyond the Political Pop paintings he showed there. Save to My Ocula
ShanghART announced late last week that Shanghai painter Yu Youhan died of illness on 13 December.
‘All members of ShanghART deeply mourn our beloved Teacher Yu, and extend our sincere condolences to his friends and relatives,’ they said in a statement.
‘Teacher’ is an honorific often applied to artists in Chinese, but in Yu’s case it was true. After graduating from the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts in Beijing in 1973, Yu began teaching at the Shanghai Arts and Crafts School, where his study of Western art was highly influential as China opened to the outside world.
Yu’s students include abstract artist Ding Yi, conceptual artist Chen Zhen, and pop artist Ji Wenyu.
In his own practice, Yu blended Western abstraction with Chinese philosophy and art traditions. In 1989, he presented his ‘Circle’ series, which alludes to the origin of the universe.
Other notable series include the ‘Ah, Us!’ group portraits, which captured China’s quickly transforming society in the late 1990s, and the ‘Yimeng Mountain’ landscapes painted in the early 2000s.
ShanghART also shared a poem Yu wrote that served as something of an artist manifesto.
Art expresses the freedom of the heart. Art helps break the constraints of consciousness and culture. Art is connected to tradition on one end and the future on the other. Art seeks novelty, but novelty is not the only goal. Art is creation, but creation is not the only requirement. There are as many requirements for art as there are needs for the soul.
Art requires honesty, and artists should be honest, but honesty is not art. Art pursues perfection, but perfect art is the most imperfect. Contemporary art does not come from life, contemporary art comes from culture. Criticism is the life of modern art, and beauty is criticism. After too much criticism, people long for silence. At this time, beauty is silence. —[O]
Main image: Yu Youhan, 2018 (2018). Acrylic on canvas. 230 x 290 cm. Courtesy ShanghART.
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