During his 26 years of military service, Yu Chengyao traveled throughout 18 provinces in China, amazed by the grandeur of the natural scenery. Yu had a lifelong dedication to poem, the ability to describe the essence of scenery through condensed writing enabled him to be a keen observer, which is crucial to an artist. When he took up painting at an old age, Yu's slow, careful strokes created exceptional landscapes that possessed both physical beauty and inner vision of the artist.
With the rise of abstraction in the early 20th Century, the formal elements of lines, dots, and planes were liberated from the bounds of naturalistic representation and received attention in their own right. Yu Chengyao developed a similarly modern vocabulary after years of practice. In Landscape (Lot 295), the layering and overlapping of coloured dots and ink lines create elaborate variations of uneven grains and rocks, and produce solid geometric forms in the segmented composition. Rounded trees, conical and cylindrical rocks and crags engender a strong connection among the segmented visual elements and picture plane, revealing the rich arrangements of objects in their own height, distance and depth.