| In 1990, The World of Female Painters opened at China Central Academy of Fine Arts. I had just graduated from college. As a curator and a participating artist, I was nervous to see the audience’s feedback, just like any young person who organized an exhibition for the first time. The ’85 New Wave and the Tiananmen Square upheaval made me realize the meaninglessness of certain artistic and political values. I started looking for a way to set myself free, dying to express my powerless and lost self. I started painting portraits of my girl friends. Living in a girls’ dorm helped me understand their budding wild youth life. I was one of them. We seemed cool and fashionable, but we were so lost between finding our own way and the pressure to conform. These portraits combined strong colors, surging emotions, and bizarre spaces. | 
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Yu Hong is a Beijing-based artist.
Yu Hong, 2006 Music, Wa Wa. 400 x 110 cm. Silk, paint. Courtesy of the artist.It is difficult to talk about why I paint what I have painted. The reason is that I can’t treat the past objectively. My thoughts then reside in fading memories. When I look back on the past now, nothing is what it seemed.
In 1990, The World of Female Painters opened at China Central Academy of Fine Arts. I had just graduated from college. As a curator and a participating artist, I was nervous to see the audience’s feedback, just like any young person who organized an exhibition for the first time.
The ’85 New Wave and the Tiananmen Square upheaval made me realize the meaninglessness of certain artistic and political values. I started looking for a way to set myself free, dying to express my powerless and lost self. I started painting portraits of my girl friends. Living in a girls’ dorm helped me understand their budding wild youth life. I was one of them. We seemed cool and fashionable, but we were so lost between finding our own way and the pressure to conform. These portraits combined strong colors, surging emotions, and bizarre spaces. I strove to make everything look simple and pretty, like an advertisement, with no meanings attached. Every woman looked natural in a surreal environment. The pictorial language was exquisite and meticulous. The contrast between realness and unrealness created a tension in the image, just like the tension existing in the Chinese society in the early 90s.
