EXHIBITIONSThe Backside: Yu Hong & Olafur Eliasson

START MUSEUM is please to present the exhibition “The Backside: Yu Hong & Olafur Eliasson” on May 19th, 2024. Curated under the theme of “World Art History Since the 1960s,” this exhibition is the first issue of the series “Backdoor Made” conducted by START MUSEUM, featuring two significant works: Yu Hong’s first Virtual Reality piece, “She’s Already Gone” (2017), and Olafur Eliasson’s “Sua Fogueira Cósmica(Your Cosmic Campfire)” (2011). The exhibition is titled “The Backside” and discusses the unique and significant concepts created during the career of both artists.

Yu Hong, one of China’s most prominent contemporary female artists, has spent nearly 40 years exploring the relationship between the currents of the times and individual human nature. Her cherished “Witness to Growth” series (1999-now) juxtaposes her own life as a woman with the political, economic, and cultural fluctuations of her era. Collaborating with Khora Contemporary in Copenhagen in 2017, Yu Hong created another, more dynamic and poetic piece of her “Witness to Growth”, in the form of a 7’01’’ VR production, presented as a multi-act play. The artwork intertwines two timelines of different eras – birth, childhood, middle age, and old age of a women with times of the present, ancient, and remote antiquity – showing the progression of female individual growth and the retrogression of historical evolution, corresponding to the implication of the artwork’s English translation of its Chinese Title “She’s Here Once” and its paradoxical English Title “She’s Already Gone”. Yu Hong’s artwork reveals the most fundamental and sublime divinity and brilliance of individual life amid the flow of growth and the flow of time.

Olafur Eliasson, born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1967, half Danish and half Icelandic, spent his childhood and adolescence in Iceland, where the unique natural and cultural landscapes profoundly influenced his future creations. Since 2010, Eliasson has collaborated with chemists to create a series of pigments corresponding to every nanometer on the visible light spectrum. “Sua Fogueira Cósmica(Your Cosmic Campfire)” is a product of this period. Eliasson seeks to present different spectrums of light, produced by the overlay of primary colors, in a visible and perceptible manner to the audience. He stated, “My goal is to establish a new theory of color based on the complete spectrum of visible light. This involves turning light into pigment, although this issue has always been at the core of painting… I feel that the circular shape creates an endless feeling, allowing viewers to observe the work in a decentralized, swirling manner.”

Eliasson brings rainbows indoors with his artistic imagination and technological creativity, showcasing the intangible essence of light as substance before the viewer’s eyes, creating a transcendentally pure sensory experience of reason and science. Meanwhile, Yu Hong utilizes the latest VR technology to create a space, a sensory, immersive narrative that allows viewers to immediately project and contrast themselves. Interestingly, both artists simultaneously respond to the ancient topic of “painting” through technology. Eliasson illuminates the colors of light in painting with a landscape-oriented, experiential, and perceptual approach, while Yu Hong continuously emphasizes the reality of painting in the virtual world with vivid brushstrokes and intense colors. These two artworks represent the backside of humanistic technology in this era, yet they resonate with each other on a broader dimension.