Via Crusis - 21th century...
3:02 p.m.
Left and right: Il cammino della vita, by Yu Hong (2019-22)
Center: Esprimi un desiderio, by Yu Hong (2023)
As part of the satellite exhibitions to this year's Venice Biennale, Another One Bites the Dust, by the Chinese-born artist Yu Hong (1966), is displayed at the Chiesetta della Misericordia. The exhibition represents the cycle of life narrated through the experiences of the human being (birth, growth, desire, sex and death) but from a very contemporary and real point of view, where certain actions harm forever the lives of others who are more vulnerable.
Morte, by Yu Hong (2022)
The site-specific installation was created for this chiesetta, which is a Byzantine Romanesque church founded in 939 AD by the Augustinian congregation. Yu Hong's work, like a kaleidoscope, recounts life events through her artistic lens and represents them with supernatural realism, destabilizing our understanding of what happens around us and we so often deny. It is a call to society to recognize, in these paintings, the most difficult and complex realities that human beings must face.
With a golden background like that of Byzantine paintings and panels that are shaped like arches, Another One Bites the Dust feels like past sacred paintings.
Although the expression “bite the dust” originally appears in the Bible, the title of the exhibition comes from the song by the English group Queen, written in 1980, which describes violence between individuals. Yu Hong believes that the speed of current changes and globalization is leading civilization towards disaster.
La Nave dei Folli, by Yu Hong (2021)
At the back of the church, just below the choir, we find the painting La Nave dei Folli, an appropriation of the renowned work by Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819), where the desperate survivors of a shipwreck commit murders and cannibalism to avoid dying of starvation on high seas. Our artist today considers the current humanitarian crises so calamitous that they are compared to the work of Géricault and concludes by saying that, in today's world, we are losing our balance and recognition of what is right and what is wrong.
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