An accomplished and versatile painter, Yu Hong is one of China's most celebrated female artists. Her autobiographical approach to art positions friends, family and personal experience against the upheavals of recent Chinese history, thus giving world-changing events a more human significance and putting private milestones into a broader context. In her latest work, Yu Hong continues to display the same concern for the everyday and the humane, while drawing on a wealth of research and scholarship related to classical works of Chinese and western art.

For her solo exhibition at UCCA, Yu Hong will adorn the ceiling of the Middle Room with four of her large, four-panel paintings, transforming the space into a golden canopy, a fresco-covered sky. Each of the canvases is inspired by a different classical work of art: an Italian Renaissance ceiling fresco, a small etching by Francisco Goya, the stunning Buddhist artwork of the Dunhuang Grottoes in Gansu Province and the ancient paintings in the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas in Kizil, Xinjiang Province. The artist is also producing two long scrolls to flank the UCCA lobby entrance: lithe, delicate figures on free-flowing panels of silk.