Total immersion

Working closely with a virtual-reality art company based in Denmark, she was in constant touch with the tech team in Copenhagen, emailing them on a daily basis. As she painted, she scanned the images and sent them to the team to "put clothes on the naked virtual figures.

"I did my best to push the boundaries of my imagination. It's difficult to transform oil paintings into three-dimensional works," Yu says of her yearlong collaboration with Khora Contemporary, the Danish team specializing in virtual-reality art.

At the opening ceremony on Jan 6, many of Yu's artist friends came to experience the work, and they seemed impressed. Oil painter Su Xinping says he could feel the pain when he watched the woman from the Ming Dynasty remove the strips of cloth binding her feet. He also expressed an interest in making a VR artwork.

Yu says her peers from the art world were impressed by the visual interaction of the work, and described the future trend of combining art with technology as both inevitable and unpredictable.

She described the Beijing art space showing her work as a "hospital with many cubicles housing people wearing headsets" and a totally different experience from traditional exhibition halls with art pieces mounted on the walls.

"I don't know how art will be presented in the future. But I do know that art gives cold tech a warm hue," Yu says.

In She's Already Gone, Yu focuses on women and explores their social status and experiences, a recurring topic for the artist, who is one of the most important oil painters in China.

"The priestess in the Neolithic era enjoyed the highest social class in a matriarchal society," Yu says.

The three other scenes reflect Yu's own life experiences: Her grandmother was forced to bind her feet from childhood; the girl sitting on a windowsill watching a parade was Yu at the age of 6 in 1972 during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76); and the opening scene depicts her giving birth to her daughter in the 1990s.