Bosch's Paradise
Dong Yuan
董媛
Production date
2013
Object Detail
Media
oil on canvas, glass bottles, wooden cupboards and cabinets, wooden tree, video, plastic toys, wooden mannequin
Measurements
328 parts, size variable
Notes
When Dong Yuan learned that the place of her happiest childhood memories –– her grandmother’s house in the countryside near Dalian –– was about to be demolished, she decided to re-create it in paint, one room at a time, in a two-year-long project that she described as ‘fixing it in memory’. Exhibited in 2013 as ‘A Short History of Everything: Grandma’s House and Bosch’s Garden’, this installation of more than 800 separate paintings marries the fantastical universe imagined by Hieronymus Bosch in ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ with a rural Chinese family home, replete with heavy furniture and cabinets filled with teacups, rice bowls, folded flowered quilts and New Year pictures. Bosch’s Paradise (2013), is a part of this larger work, an installation of more than 300 paintings and objects. Hanging on the walls and filling the drawers and shelves of ornate wooden cabinets, they depict elements taken from Bosch’s fevered imaginings, including tiny naked figures, monsters, animals and insects, plants and flowers, and landscapes that recall the rural beauty of the countryside around Dalian, long ago. Exhibited in Beijing alongside the painted contents of her grandmother’s house, these juxtapositions of Spring Festival folk art, porcelain figures of household gods in their shrines, mass-produced calendars, pictures of Mao, and all the patterned quotidian objects that once filled a humble rural home sit comfortably alongside a visual catalogue of Bosch’s imagery: removed from their original contexts they suggest that reality and imagination are two sides of the same coin. An astonishing feat of trompe l’oeil, it’s a reflection on Dong Yuan’s personal journey from rural Liaoning Province to the global megacity of Beijing, connecting her dreams and memories of a fast-vanishing world with the purely physical elements of everyday life.
Accession number
2016.087