Beijing Dangdai Art Fair 2025 will release a series of posters centered on the works exhibited at the fair. These works not only offer possible interpretations and responses to the theme “CONCAVE & CONVEX”, but also serve as highlights previews of important works and participating galleries at the fair. The poster shared this time is from ShanghART Gallery, featuring an important late-style work by Yu Youhan.

Throughout his long and diverse artistic career, Yu Youhan integrates emotional experience from tangible reality, elements of various artistic movements, and the historical and realistic foundations of his native cultural heritage into his unremitting exploration of “Oriental Abstraction”. Titled Abstract – Square · Circle, this painting was created during the period that he returned to the theme of “circle” and is a concentrated embodiment of his artistic vision of “circle within square”. Influenced by Laozi and Taoist philosophy, particularly the notions of ziran (naturalness), wuwei (non-action) and danbo (detachment from fame and wealth), Yu Youhan began to create the Circle Series in 1984, using the motif as a metaphor of the constant nature of the world as well as the universe. Around 2010, after a period of pop-art experimentation, Yu Youhan returned to the motif of “circle”, changing from his previous “black-and-white circles” to the multicolored circles.

In Abstract – Square · Circle, we can also see a rich but restrained color base. The huge circle is delineated with fine brushstrokes and calligraphic writing, reflecting the artist taking inspiration from landscape painting traditions since the Song and Yuan dynasties. The shape at the bottom of the composition looks like the corner of a square, a mountain peak, or a slice of a field, forming a harmonious interplay with the “circle” above. Together, the two construct the imagery of heaven and earth that encompasses virtually everything, and convey the dialectical beauty of the interdependence between square and circle, virtuality and reality, concave and convex, instant and eternity.

“After repeated reflection and practice, I chose a simple image – the circle – as the central motif of my painting. Circle conveys a sense of stability, and can embody both the beginning and the end of all things. Thus it implies both an instant and eternity.” – Yu Youhan