Young Hong Kong artist Solomon Yu presents his multimedia installation project, a tribute to his parents, as the second part of this three part installation series. Solomon Yu likes to put viewers into a state of negotiation among the realms of visual, sign, reality and representation. He references a wide range of visual materials that include historical archives, press images, social networking, uploads, even porn. Primarily a painter, Solomon works to explore and expand paintings possibility as a site of meaning production within and beyond its pictorial frame. In this age of advancement in digital media, he is interested in the tensions between a painting’s content and its context, and the potentials they present for a sensible yet critical discourse. Turning a photographic image into a negative form in painting, Yu works to re-examine Roland Barthes’ ideas about photography being a kind of “prophecy in reverse” and wonders if he is revising the prophecy into a work-in-progress by painting the photographic image in negative. His work aims to explore how painting and image-making technology, such as digital imagery, could be brought together to share a mutual dialogue.
In Return of the Dead – Double Portrait of My Youthful Parents, Yu presents a large oil on canvas that portrays a portrait of his Mother and Father forty years ago. Painted to resemble an oversized colour negative the work transforms itself when it is viewed through the computer monitor positioned in front. Two opposites present themselves. Reality and the reality depicted in the computer screen. What has been in the negative now appears in the positive and vice versa. The question remains which is the true reality?
About the Artist
Solomon Yu studied Clothing with Textiles at Nottingham Trent University in England. He then went on to study Fine Art, graduating with a BA Fine Arts from RMIT in Melbourne, Australia and a MA Fine Arts from the prestigious Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2011. Yu has participated in exhibitions in his native Hong Kong as well as in Australia and Austria. In 2005 he was awarded the Best Artwork Award from the Hong Kong Arts School and in 2010 he was awarded a scholarship from the International Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria.
