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In 2009, the "Lorenzo Il Magnifico" Lifetime Achievement Award was awarded to Shu Yong, an internationally renowned Chinese artist who, on the occasion of the VII Florence Biennale, presented some paintings from his Chinese Myths series and a video that impressed the audience with emotional images and a strong provocative charge.

Shu Yong, born in Xupu county, Hunan province (China) in 1974, is one of the most interesting artists on the Chinese and international contemporary scene. He has often appeared in the media as a controversial artist thanks to his ability to question the very foundations of Chinese society, which he often uses as his personal laboratory. The 2008 performance Bubbles in the Office, in which the offices of the most economically developed area of Guangdong were filled with soap bubbles, was emblematic in this respect. For Shu Yong, the bubbles are a metaphor for the temporal power, ideals and ambitions of businessmen, mere illusions created by the reflection of the bubbles in which we perceive another level of reality. This is why they have become a distinctive feature of his artistic research.

In Chinese Myths, Shu Yong reflects on ancient Chinese myths that are presented in a sort of world poised between the past and the present. The space of the painting is filled with bubbles with a thousand reflections that highlight a mythology with several perspectives from which to be observed. These bubbles cover the characters themselves with a veil of indecipherable mystery. This is the same fascination that China, an often impenetrable mystery, exerts on Westerners.

Shu Yong forays into a wide range of media, from painting to performance, from hyperrealist sculpture to photography. He is an eclectic artist with a track record of public interventions and exhibitions all over the world. He possesses a creative force that shines through in his Beijing studio where he lives and works, a space where he constantly curates exhibitions of his work and where one can distinctly perceive the strong dialogue that unites his artistic creation. Shu Yong is an artist who succeeds in communicating important things through a calm voice, a creative individual who, through his work, traces the path to making Chinese contemporary art an open dialogue.