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Lot Essay
Within China's avant-garde movement in the 1990s, Yu Youhan is widely known and celebrated as the father of abstract painting and Political Pop. As an art teacher in Shanghai, he quickly dismissed the pursuit of interdisciplinary and international practices that many artists were adopting at that time and inspired experimentation in the appropriation of conventional communist imagery with Western and domestic "pop" forms.
In 1989, Yu Youhan began his most notable Mao Series which would later establish and solidify his artistic career. This work, Untitled (Lot 183), appropriates a standard image of Mao that had been widely disseminated as political propaganda while demonstrating Yu's characteristic inclination towards the kind of color field experimentation that western Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol, notably dopted. By flattening the color field, the artist internalizes the imagery he continuously witnessed during the Cultural Revolution and passionately revives the visual experience with an altogether different purpose. Through the combination of seemingly contradictory visual traditions, Yu brings together the diverse histories within these two different cultures, investigating the idea of cultural identity and memory. Interestingly, Yu chooses to use abstraction as a tool to merge these two visual traditions together. According to him, he sees abstraction as an aesthetic language that is a shared commonality between traditional Chinese art and Western modern art movements that emerged from Post-Impressionism. For Yu, artists from both groups exercise the same artistic practice in which the artist subjectively internalizes an objective object in the real world and projects the end result of this internalization onto the canvas. Indeed, Yu's works have claimed an individual voice and place for him as one of the first Chinese artists to perceive and utilize this common ground between the East and the West.
In 1989, Yu Youhan began his most notable Mao Series which would later establish and solidify his artistic career. This work, Untitled (Lot 183), appropriates a standard image of Mao that had been widely disseminated as political propaganda while demonstrating Yu's characteristic inclination towards the kind of color field experimentation that western Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol, notably dopted. By flattening the color field, the artist internalizes the imagery he continuously witnessed during the Cultural Revolution and passionately revives the visual experience with an altogether different purpose. Through the combination of seemingly contradictory visual traditions, Yu brings together the diverse histories within these two different cultures, investigating the idea of cultural identity and memory. Interestingly, Yu chooses to use abstraction as a tool to merge these two visual traditions together. According to him, he sees abstraction as an aesthetic language that is a shared commonality between traditional Chinese art and Western modern art movements that emerged from Post-Impressionism. For Yu, artists from both groups exercise the same artistic practice in which the artist subjectively internalizes an objective object in the real world and projects the end result of this internalization onto the canvas. Indeed, Yu's works have claimed an individual voice and place for him as one of the first Chinese artists to perceive and utilize this common ground between the East and the West.