Artist Yu Hong's ongoing exhibition at the Art Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts includes the show's centerpiece, A Garden of Dreams, paintings that portray girls who strike gymnastic poses against backgrounds of sheer cliffs. (Photo provided to China Daily)
But what Yu communicates through her painting is unrelated to the plot.
She says the phrase "youyuan jingmeng (walking in the garden and having an interrupted dream)" is to show that when one takes a stroll, one is bound to encounter unexpected, surprising things.
In the painting, she portrays the well-known Chinese fable "mangren moxiang", or blind people touching an elephant.
The story is about how a group of blind people try to visualize what an elephant looks like by touching it and how they have arguments about their conclusions as their perceptions differ.
Her portrayal satirizes those who believe that they can see the whole issue in a given situation when they are aware only about a part of the issue.
Yu reinterprets the fable in a modern context, saying: "Everybody believes they are smart enough to get the whole idea. However, we really know very little about what is going on, and it is likely that we often misjudge the situation."
In her work, she also alludes to the global refugee crisis by painting babies placed in basins in grass, and among them is a refugee child lying on his back on a beach. This is a reference to the death of Turkish refugee child Alan Kurdi, who was found on a Turkish beach last September, which brought the Syrian refugee crisis to the attention of the world.
