In Vine Pattern – Tropic of Cancer, Yu Honglei brings together thirteen works on canvas and two video works to form an exhibition centered on painting, the image, memory, and looking. For viewers who have followed his practice over time, the central position that painting occupies in this exhibition may appear to signal a decisive shift from sculpture and video toward the pictorial plane. Yet to describe this body of work simply as a “shift in medium” would risk overlooking a more continuous dimension of Yu Honglei’s practice: over the past decade and more, painting and drawing have already been repeatedly rehearsed, tested, and held in suspension as a modus operandi. It carries forward his sculptural sensitivity to volume, weight, center of gravity, and spatial relations, while translating from video an experience of time, looped duration, viewing pathways, and narrative framing.

“Vine Pattern” suggests growth, softness, ornamentality, and continuous proliferation; “Tropic of Cancer,” by contrast, names a geographic boundary codified by systems of knowledge, while also invoking Henry Miller’s (1891–1980) novel of the same title. Vine Pattern – Tropic of Cancer is not simply an exhibition with painting as its principal medium. Rather, it shows how Yu Honglei reorganizes, through the two-dimensional surface, his knowledge and experiences of media, art history, and personal perception. The artist allows control and release to remain together within the picture, giving rise to a recognizable painterly language of his own. What truly unfolds here is a set of relations continually generated between structure, perception, art history, and visceral memories. Bands of background color, geometric forms, diagonals, vines, stars, hearts, and vivid hues are constituents of his style; beneath the painted surface lies Yu Honglei’s way of looking at the world and organizing experience.