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Yu Jian 余键 （1970--） is a Sichuanese painter that specializes in traditional Chinese painting 国画(guó huà) and is known for her colorful depictions of female subjects in dreamscapes. She is also prolific in other art media, such as oil on canvas, lacquer painting, ceramics, and sculpture. Her subjects are mostly women figures positioned in dreamy environments characterized by heavy colorism. Highly influenced by British pre-Raphaelites and Picasso, she blends the performative style found in modern Western paintings with the folk art patterns in southwestern Chinese culture. She is best known for painting women in a meticulous and elaborate style; 工笔重彩(gōngbǐ zhòngcǎi), a genre of traditional Chinese realistic painting which centers on colorful and detailed decoration of the painted subject.

Education
Yu Jian was born and raised in Sichuan, a province in southwestern China. In 1984, Yu Jian was admitted to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts Middle School as one of the top three students in the whole country. Then from 1988 to 1992, she majored in Chinese painting with a concentration on character-painting in the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art). She continued her master’s education in the Central Academy of Fine Arts from 2013 to 2015. In her Master’s thesis, she maintains that the harmony of humanity and nature is deeply rooted in traditional Chinese philosophy, which informs her theoretical framework in artistic creation. She started teaching at Fuzhou University in Xiamen in 1992 and continues to work there today.

Career and Work
Her early works are mostly in the strict academic style in which she was trained. Before working at Fuzhou University, she often painted female figures in relation to flowers, plants and religious iconography in an attempt to capture the mysteries of the natural world and the emotions it arouses in female subjects. Many of these works are an expression of her own subconscious. One major theme throughout her works is that of the female subject in dreams. Depending on whether she is drawing on what she calls her “life instinct” or “death instinct”, her compositions can be either bright with sexual undertones or grotesque and reminiscent of those from by the 17th-century Spanish painter El Greco.In general, the imaginative figures, dreamy demeanor of the characters, and dramatic use of colors are said to be influenced by local Sichuanese culture. The unsettling emotions produced by Yu’s paintings, some critics believe, reflect the Sichuanese belief system of ancestor worship, Daoism and Buddhism. Working in Xiamen was a turning point in her career. Her more recent work portrays a self that is more open and welcoming of the world; in contrast to in the grip of fear, nightmares, and conflict, as was often represented in her earlier work.

Reception and Criticism
Her work was warmly received for its phantasmagorical depiction of female subjects. But they were also criticized for relying too much on intuition and emotion, and for lacking control over form and expression. However, one critic argues that her exploration of female subjects as a woman artist itself can be taken as a critique of the male-dominated discourse of aesthetic culture. Nevertheless, some critics think Yu still needs to develop her own language. According to them, this is because Yu’s exploration of female subjects doesn’t come across as smoothly due to her conflicting painting styles. The marriage between Western style painting techniques and local folk art patterns has failed to achieve the harmony she wants, and she is yet to blend them together seamlessly.