Romance of Spring, 2008 [Courtesy of Long March Space/Photo provided to China Daily]

In addition, Yu's most recent artistic expression, She's Already Gone (2017), a virtual reality project in collaboration with Khora Contemporary in Denmark, will be included in Art Basel's Kabinett sector. In this work, the viewer is placed in the position of a female protagonist, traversing through four different eras: the Neolithic Hongshan culture, the Ming Dynasty, the Cultural Revolution and contemporary times. Some of the scenes come from the artist's personal life, filling the work with an intriguing exchange between affairs both virtual and real. Through this process, history and individual life mix with each other, repeat and change.

Yu studied oil painting at Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) and received a postgraduate degree from the department in 1996; she's been a teacher there since 1988. From the start, Yu was trained in realist painting, which over time would translate into her own individual aesthetic language. The core subject of her paintings has always been human nature, and the way human beings grow and exist in society. If China had an equivalent to England's LS Lowry, then Yu might be it.

The spirit of Yu's creation most often arises from her personal life and the surroundings of quotidian existence, constructing a world which ingeniously fuses together perceptions of time and memories through art, as well as adeptly seizing the sporadic evolution of the emotions of human self-experience. The Witness to Growth series acts as a sort of record of life, while touching upon the current events of each year. Yu often uses existing images as a starting point for her art, taking photographs and her own point of view to create compositions and rearrange them in renewed combinations that emphasise the objective way in which pre-existing images can be reused and strengthened in new compositions.