Marco Grassi’s Portraits Put Hyperrealism Slightly Off Balance

Chinese artist Ying Yefu creates blatantly macabre paintings with a punchline. It's as if each piece involves some sort of visual joke, where one detail is altered in such a way that the forms we thought we recognized are not what they seem. A cranium peeled open to reveal red blood doubles as a watermelon parted down the middle. An infant's body is hybridized with a phallic, fleshy appendage that extends out of his head lopsidedly. Part of the visual pleasure of Ying's work is deducing the various incongruous elements at play in each piece. While Ying's art is reminiscent of the creepy-cute aesthetic popularized by Japanese painters of the generation before him (Ying was born in 1980), much of his work is executed using traditional Chinese painting techniques that tie his unmistakably contemporary style to his cultural heritage.