There is No New Thing Under the Sun This is a tapestry-like painting made with watercolor on linen with an old military parachute sewn into the center.
As one of the most common forms of historical artifacts, tapestries are both decorative and symbolic of their owners’ wealth and status. Across various cultures and historical periods, tapestry has often served as records of prosperity and social development—particularly through patterns depicting cultivated flowers, vegetables, and hunted animals, which signified abundance.
In this work, I used watercolor to simulate the aged texture of an old tapestry. The outer circle features a cyclical pattern of grapes and tomatoes progressing from growth to decay, symbolizing the cyclical nature of life and fate. The inner circle shows tiny falling human figures, echoing the military parachute sewn into the center of the tapestry. This composition conveys a psychological state of 'resisting the fall, yet unable to defy death.' It transforms the tragedy of history and the repetition of fate into an ornamental object through the medium of an “artifact.”
From this perspective, the work critically engages with the notion of cultural decay in contemporary society—particularly within the sub-theme the artifacts (one of the three sub-themes of the Summer Decay series, alongside the chimera and the landscape backdrops in photography). It reflects on how artifacts, once removed from their original geographic, historical, and functional contexts, are often privatized and stripped of meaning, resulting in a flattened, aestheticized form of “death.” In doing so, the work responds to the overarching theme of cultural decay.
Artist Yuna Yu was born in 1997, Sichuan, China, studied and lived in Toronto, Beijing and London, currently bases in London.
Yuna’s practice focuses on exploring self-mythology, and the cultural and historical decay within a contemporary framework. In her early practice, she investigated individual psychological experiences, often involving themes such as blurred violence, provocative intimacy, nostalgic memory, and cycles of self-destruction and reconstruction. Over time, her work expanded in scope to examine the collective human experience in relation to mythology, decay, time, and eternity — themes she explores in her most recent series, Summer Decay.
