Born in Xi’an, 1966, Yu Hong currently lives and works in Beijing. In 1980s, she studied oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Since 1988 she has been a teacher at CAFA, and received her MFA from CAFA in 1996. The core subject of Yu’s paintings has always been human nature, and how human beings grow and exist in this society, in this world. Those figures, painted down by her brushes, convey the feelings and self-analysis of people thrown into the reality of society. Her creative inspiration often comes from personal life and the daily lives of people around her. Through art, she constructs a world that cleverly integrates the feelings and memories about time. She is good at capturing the emotions that characters exude and evolve due to their own experiences. Yu employs the mode of parallel construction to perceptually combine macro and micro perspectives, presenting the situation of individuals in a group and the encounters between people.

Her recent major solo exhibitions include: “The World of Saha” (Long Museum, Shanghai, 2019), “Garden of Dreams” (the CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, 2016), “Concurrent Realms” (Suzhou Museum, Suzhou, 2015), “Golden Horizon” (Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, 2011), “Golden Sky” (the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2010). Recent selected group exhibitions include: “Stepping out!” (Lillehammer Art Museum, Norway, 2022), “And Now” (White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, 2020), “Speculative Cultures: A Virtual Reality Exhibition” (Parsons School of Design, New York, 2019), “Turning Point—40 Years of Chinese Contemporary Art” (Long Museum, Shanghai, 2018), “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2017) and others.