Ren Hong: Kaleidoscope - Art Review

Art Review Issue 25

Ren Hong was born into performing arts commune at the beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution. Big red banners, ballets, and oversized proletariat posters formed the visual montage of Ren Hong’s early days while symphonic music and nationalistic choruses were the soundtrack. It was the artist’s multicolored memories of these controversial times that inspired her return to painting many decades later. 

Soon after graduating from Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Art and Design in 1987, Ren Hong put aside the paintbrush for a practice in ceramics and eventually graphic design. It wasn’t until three years ago that she made a courageous comeback with a body of work entitled “Red Memories”. In these works, the artist presents nineteen-sixties and seventy-era images filtered through a pattern of repeated graphic icons. The works simultaneously express nostalgia for an era of idealism as well as the chaotic effect of that era.

The main images that compose Ren Hong’s works are the familiar icons of China’s sociopolitical past: pictures of Chairman Mao, diligent proletariat or revolutionary ballet characters. These popular images, almost exhausted of meaning by their redundancy, are not the subject of critical analysis, as they are in some other Chinese artists' works, but instead, express a romance with the artist’s own personal history, and most importantly are a pretext to paint. Ren Hong interprets these images in bold, lively hues. It is the same images that we’ve seen over and over, yet they are different, novel, shattered by scrupulously repeated, hand painted patterns.

Ren Hong’s formal strategy is double-layered. On one layer she renders the Cultural Revolution image while on the other, she meticulously spins a web of one, singular yet reoccurring graphic. Which layer is on the surface is an ambiguous visual game of push and pull. Almost like Bridget Riley’s Op art paintings from the sixties and seventies, Ren Hong’s formal technique results in a pulsating illusion where the foreground and background are in a continuous loop of interchanging positions. “Kaleidoscope”, the name of the show that recently opened in Shanghai, aptly describes the hallucinatory effect that these paintings have upon the viewer.

While the main image is richly rendered, the patterned layer is simple and silhouetted. This layer is comprised of flying birds, arrows, butterflies images that connote a rising up, elation. These icons appear random at first, but upon closer investigation we sense a common theme remnant of the artist’s early nation-building days, where the message was Onwards Ho! toward a better and higher socialist plane. Today these patterns still connote a sense of optimism, but they also connect to the more contemporary sensibility of the simplified icon. This graphic treatment also shares similar concerns to the nineteen-eighties Pattern Painting movement in the United States where a renewed interest in handicraft as well as the purely decorative, helped shape intricate works. Ren Hong has used the Cultural Revolution as a similar point of departure. By juxtaposing modern Chinese folk images, she has renewed them as sophisticated works of art.