Cong Yu
Selected Works
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Born 1998 in Nanjing, China
Artist Statement
Yu paints from the body of someone who has moved. A glimpse of skin in a mirror, a bathroom under a skylight, a roadside sunrise, a patch of desert, a flower opening too violently into decay — these fragments are the residue of places lived in and left behind. From them she builds an account of what it means to carry one country inside another.
Working primarily in large-scale oil painting, Yu uses gesture as a way of thinking. Forms are built, destroyed, buried, and returned to the surface — the way memory holds, loses, and recovers a place. Bodies dissolve into landscapes; interiors become weather systems; flowers, roads, ruins, mirrors, and encampments appear as unstable sites of intimacy and survival. A place can feel at once inhabited and unreachable.
Yu's own experiene of moving between countries is the ground of the work. Her recent paintings are rooted in Sydney — its waters, interiors, roads, and intimate histories — and reach outward across the Australian landscape, from ocean to outback and the long distances between. A period of living in Shanghai gives her the distance to look back: from there, small erotic memories and private attachments return to the paintings as atmosphere, structure, and myth. Here distance is not loss but a way of keeping a place alive.
In Yu's work the Australian landscape is never neutral or empty. It is charged with fantasy and estrangement, with inherited myths of the bush and the wager that a self can be remade elsewhere. Her subject, finally, is what survives the crossing: the body's insistence on desire, attachment, and pleasure even where the ground keeps shifting — intimacy as the thing that endures between home and displacement, the private self and the landscapes it is still trying to belong to.
Bio
Cong Yu holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from the University of Sydney. In 2025, she undertook the Spring Artist Residency Program at Broken Hill Art Exchange, supported by Create NSW. She currently lives and works between Sydney, Australia, and Shanghai, China.