Strawberry Manifesto

“Pink is a new crisis, burn down the world with my cigarette.” This is how Yuyu Zhitong approaches her new exhibition, inspired by the violet and pink glows of her favorite lighter.
From London, the artist breathes a flamboyant and poetic energy into her new paintings. She undertakes a profound exploration of gestural mark-making, constantly seeking to confront established paradigms of knowledge, feeling, and perceptual experience.
Zhitong conceives her painting as a logical game to be artistically solved. Drawing from her studies in science and her passion for mathematics, she embraces the reductio ad absurdum methodology: reasoning by the absurd. This analytical tool allows her to tackle complex visual challenges, giving rise to compositions distinguished by their structure as well as their extravagance, mystery, and fantasy.
The sometimes swirling, almost musical energy of her painting is not unfamiliar to the practice of dance. This colorful ballet could similarly find its origins in the artist’s diligent practice of Chinese classical, folk, and contemporary dance. Zhitong thus works on the emotional perception and communicative potential of body language.
Through her diverse influences and the omnipresent Ultramarine and Magenta colors in the paintings of this series, the artist finds particular satisfaction in intertwining a whimsical sense of mystery with a more candid influence. This duality is expressed through the subtle interplay of shadow and light, the juxtaposition of vibrant and muted colors, or the fusion of abstract and figurative forms. A meeting between movement and stillness, rationality and sensitivity.
Born in Guangzhou, China, in 1993, Yuyu Zhitong currently resides and works in London. Graduating with honors from the Slade School of Fine Art at the University College of London in 2020, she also participated in an exchange program at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 2023, Zhitong completes her Master’s degree at the Royal College of Art in London.
“Strawberry Manifesto” is the artist’s first solo exhibition.