When I created the Round Series, it was an escape. I felt society was too noisy. I needed to find a place, a place like an ivory tower in which to hide.

（Statements by the Artist, 2009)

If we do not include the avant – garde art movements of the Juelan Society, the Chinese Independent Art Association and other modern art groups of the 1930s, mostly made up of artists from Shanghai and Guangzhou-mostly Post- Impressionists, Cubists, Surre alists and Fauvists, abstract art on the Chinese mainland only really developed as a historical phenomenon after the Western modernist wave entered China in the 1980s. Accompanying the Chinese avant-garde art of the 1980s and the Academist art that reflected on and questioned the tradition that used an education in realism as its core, Abstraction and abstract art also used the morphology of a revolution in art to enter the ranks of Chinese modern art.

(Yin Shuangxi, Long River Undercurrent: Abstract Art in China Since 1978, 2010[Extract])

Yu Youhan had begun early on, in 1981, to create abstract works such as Black and White and Purple Totem. His works broke away from natural phenomena, and used the repeated round dots and the directions of lines and a color gamut to express his particular understanding of the world. The later Round series with even greater casual ease expressed this thinking of his, and also poured in graphics of an even richer power of generalization.

(Gong Yunbiao, Shanghai: Report on Abstract Art, 2005[Extract])