Yu Hong: Field of Asura at Lisson Gallery New York

Chinese painter Yu Hong opens her first exhibition at Lisson Gallery New York, Field of Asura, at 504 West 24th Street in Chelsea. The show runs from November 4, 2026 to January 9, 2027, with an opening reception on November 4 from 6 to 8pm.

Born in Xi'an in 1966, Yu Hong studied oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, graduating in 1988, and has taught there ever since. She paints modern-day fables populated by real people, among them friends, acquaintances and family. Her long-running autobiographical project, Witness to Growth, began in the 1990s as a series of diptychs that set her own life beside news clippings from each period. Since 2010 she has used gold backgrounds to give her contemporary figures the presence of icons. Her first major US museum show took place at SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah in 2023, and in 2024 the Asian Art Initiative of the Guggenheim Museum organized her first major European exhibition in Venice during the Biennale.

The New York presentation brings together new and recent paintings, anchored by a group of large-scale works. These include newly completed multi-panel compositions modeled on the structure of classical European altarpieces, along with selected mid- and small-scale canvases. The title work is an arched, three-part altarpiece showing a swirling tower of figures, some swallowed by a column of clouds and others lifted by it, all seemingly indifferent to their fate. The Asura realm of the title, found in both Buddhist and Hindu lore, is a place of endless conflict among demigods and deities, and the show offers it as a metaphor for a modern world caught in perpetual struggle.

Other works draw on art history in different ways. Lament, inspired by Rogier van der Weyden's The Descent from the Cross (1435), shows a naked corpse lowered into a shroud, while Wind Rising gathers nymphs at sunset. Yu Hong's figures avoid meeting the viewer's eye, which adds to a sense of alienation and keeps attention on the physical closeness between bodies. The only previously made work, Night Walk (2023), refers to Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Blind Leading the Blind (1568).

A new book accompanies the exhibition, with essays by Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky, Professor Emerita and former O. Munsterberg Chair of Asian Art at Bard College, and Susie Ferrell, Associate Curator of Chinese Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm, and by appointment.