Picturing the human condition

"As a painter, my job is to observe the world from a certain distance, even though I'm also part of the World of Saha," Yu says. "All the puzzles, distress and anxiety experienced in this world that I've observed permeates my work, through which you see a reflection of the world from my perspective."

For example, in the aforementioned painting of a rock and the people around it - derived from an ancient Chinese fable of an old man determined to move the mountains that blocked the path in front of his house - Yu tries to depict the daily struggles in life which "can be a chaos full of anxiety".

Painted on a canvas that measures about 9 meters wide by 5 meters high, the wall-mounted art piece immediately captures the attention of visitors due to its sheer size.

"It's like the reality you wake up to every morning," says Jerome Sans, curator of the exhibition. "You can't escape. You have a choice to make and then comes panic."

It is to this effect that Sans, an art critic who has also served as artistic director for several influential art institutions around the world, has curated the exhibition. He said that his aim was to unfold Yu's 30-year artistic career like "a visual opera".

Born in 1966 in Xi'an, Yu received training in realism painting at the China Central Academy of Art when she was 14. The core subject of her paintings has always been human nature and how we have progressed and coexisted in the world. Over the past three decades, she has created several renowned series of works which have been highlighted in the exhibition.