From December 24, 2016 to March 26, 2017, the “Yu Youhan” retrospective exhibition (part of PSA Collection Series) will be held at Power Station of Art in Shanghai. This exhibition is the largest and most comprehensive retrospective to date for Mr. Yu Youhan, an important figure in the history of Chinese avant-garde art. Over two hundred works of paintings, sketches, and archival material will be presented, including his early abstract works, the “Circle”series, the “Ah! Us” series, the “Yimeng Mountain” series, along with approximately twenty newer works from recent years.

Born in 1943 in Shanghai, Yu Youhan graduated from the Central Academy of Craft Art (now the Academy of Arts & Design of Tsinghua University) in 1973 and had taught at the Shanghai Art and Design Academy. In the early 1990s, with his “Political Pop”, Yu Youhan became one of the earliest contemporary Chinese artists to have received international attention. Even before that, however, his abstract works with their own distinctive idiom and form had already firmly established the artist’s pioneering role in the history of avant-garde art in China.

The particular background of the times he lived in meant that his artistic path had been rather circuitous and uneven; for the same reason, however, he broke free of the shackles of Soviet academicism. The artist has said that since moving from his “composition” phase, he had studied works by Cézanne, Miró, and the American Color Field artists; thereafter, principles of “composition” aesthetics permeated his later works of divergent styles. We shall see Yu Youhan in this exhibition as an artist who spans different styles, an artist who dares try the innovation, an artist who loves his country and people.

The “Circle” Series

Since 1984, the “Circle” has emerged from Yu Youhan’s abstract paintings as a particular visual element to become enriched as a distinctive visual language of the artist’s own. With “circle” as the subject, this series employs divergent styles, with dots and lines as strokes. The black and white circles can be traced to a tradition of landscape painting dating back to the Song and Yuan dynasties (circa tenth to fourteenth century CE) as well as the gray tile-roofed houses in the lower Yangtze region of Jiangnan. The gradual addition of color circles was intended as an experiment with greater aesthetic possibilities.

When talking about his “Circle” series, the artist mentions his inspiration from Laozi on multiple occasions, “The one bears two. The two bear three. The three bear the ten thousand things”-hinting at certain qualities of the world and the universe.  As the critic Gao Minglu has noted, “The artist focuses on ‘nothingness’ or the ‘void’. Unlike the dichotomous notion of abstraction in Western and classical realism, his abstraction invites others to enter; it is the way of ‘both heaven and earth find new embodiment in the shape desired, and all things become plastic under the tip of his brush.’”

Even though Yu Youhan’s creative style evinces different manifestations throughout different phases, he has never stopped working on the “Circle” series. In recent years, he has also tried out new techniques and explored themes about the unknown.

“Ah! Us” series

The “Ah! Us” series appeared after the “Mao” series and was for the most part created between the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s. With regards to “Ah! Us”, the artist has commented that what he painted was “the entanglements of emotions day after day, night after night, over an entire lifetime, and the fear of not hiding far enough from the crowds.” They are the portraits of the multiple amid violent social upheaval, revealing out of that seemingly contradictory discourse the artist’s feelings about the “human”.

“Yimeng Mountain” series