Detail from A Garden of Dreams by Yu Hong

Is This the Worst Painting in the World Ever?

Andrew Killeen | Oct 30, 2016 5:00 pm | Add a comment | 6088 reads

I was engaged in the sort of hard-hitting investigative journalism for which the Beijinger is famous – OK, I was skimming China Daily over breakfast – when my eye alighted on a headline: “Rare Blend of Fantasy and Reality." That sounds intriguing, I thought. Then I looked at the picture below, and nearly choked on my Cheerios.

Could this, I wonder, be the worst painting in the whole world ever?

It’s not that it’s badly executed. In fact, the technical skill which has been lavished upon it in some ways makes it even more horrendous. But look at the composition, which manages to be symmetrical and unbalanced at the same time. Notice how the smoke blows in different directions on either side of the painting. There’s some nudes molesting an elephant – and a plane crash – and some naked children in teacups – and what on earth is going on?

Ah, you might say, it’s surreal, Daliesque. The clue is in the title: A Garden of Dreams. But the jumbo-gropers come not from the twilight world of the subconscious, but from the old story, claimed by the artist as Chinese but in fact originating from India, about blind men trying to describe an elephant. Except in the story they’re not generally depicted as pert-buttocked gym-bunnies.

It’s not an exploration of the unconscious mind, but a hackneyed allegory portrayed with thudding literalism. And the naked children are a rather tasteless reference to Syrian refugees. There’s nothing here with the true weirdness of dream, just a cut’n’paste assemblage of received ideas.

I was so gobsmacked by the painting’s awfulness that I decided I had to go to see the real thing. A Garden of Dreams is the title piece of an exhibition at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where its creator Yu Hong is a professor. And it’s huge – 10 meters wide, covering a whole wall.

The sheer scale of it almost made me revise my opinion, but not for long. Vast swathes of canvas are filled with the monotonous blue of sky and water. In its triptych form and imagery it’s clearly inspired by Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, but Bosch’s work is tiny, intricate and nightmarishly disturbing, not ostentatious, ugly and ersatz.

To be fair not all her paintings are terrible – but many of them are. Here, for example, is a dog on top of another dog:

Her gymnast/ballerinas reminded me of the sort of kitsch art popular in the 80s, and sure enough, she has her own version of Tennis Girl:

I’m sure that, like last time I dared to criticize Beijing’s cultural life, I’ll be accused of “cultural imperialism.” So let me be clear: this isn’t an attack on Chinese artists, or the quality of local galleries. I have enthused before, on record, about art that I’ve admired in the city.

The CAFA Museum is enormous, and there’s much to enjoy there. The stunning photography of Hiroji Kubota would alone justify a visit, and the paltry RMB 15 admission. As a glimpse of the future, there’s VR art, which will either trip you out or give you motion sickness, depending on your tolerance for these things. And the coffee is excellent.

But wait, maybe I’ve been too hasty in awarding Yu the “worst ever” title. Whose are these kindergarten scrawls, these brightly-colored, cack-handed daubs, inexplicably given gallery space all round the world?