Spiritualism of History

 Bao Dong

The human body, and above all the female body, is of Song Kun’s greatest interest and artistic command. It refers back to not only her gender, but also her solid academic background. As a classic motif in art history, the body is under constant trials nowadays. Or rather, it is imprisoned as mere signifiers within gender politics. But the bodies in Song’s artworks are not mere signifiers. They convey a sensibility through rigorous forms, and moreover, an ideal beauty of the new generation, which almost renders Song’s paintings classical in a sense. In this day and age, she is concocting magnificent paradigms from miscellaneous identities and dreams.

These figures and forms depict women first and foremost. As a woman, Song has an implicit understanding of womanhood. She paints herself, and paints others through herself or vice versa. Though placed under various conditions, the female bodies in her paintings are all transcending or alienated from reality. They are the fantasized bodies, the cyborg bodies, the BJD bodies and bodies in bondage. Song endows upon them a mythic sci-fi sex appeal, as well as a swift yet tangible sensibility in characterization, styling and her brushstroke.

In Song’s work, “women” is not a social identity, but a continuously generated dimension beyond boundary, spanning from personal experiences to the grand narrative. Here, “she” can be understood as the new sensibility prescribed by Susan Sontag. “From the vantage point of this new sensibility, the beauty of a machine or of the solution to a mathematical problem, of a painting by Jasper Johns, of a film by Jean-Luc Godard, and of the personalities and music of the Beatles is equally accessible.”

Of course, the times of Song is far from that of Sontag. Song is linked to the beauty of synthetic materials, of human flesh and mechanical apparatus, of ambient, emo and electronic music, of fashion, of Renaissance portraiture, Buddhism beliefs and a distinctively Chinese character. Within this remarkable beauty lies the spirit and soul of Song’s oeuvres.

Song remains an animist in the face of contemporary society and culture. She is, therefore, also a border-crosser and a healer. She works among different mediums in an attempt to recover a sensibility barred off by rules and restrictions. For the same reason, an animized race takes center stage in her latest works. There, the artist bridges between humans and objects, emotions and rational order, desire and soberness, flesh and bone, as well as life and death. Aside from paintings, she employs live music, music videos, installations and other media to create apperception, to connect diverse art forms, and to coalesce virtuality with reality. She likes the imageries of waves and transparent materials, which to her signify the state of coming from nowhere, the concept of no self, and the acceptance of no certainty.

On this level, Song’s artworks are not only a posteriori and rooted in the here and now, but also transcendental and traveling between the past and future. All that belongs to the present is transitory, a chance occurrence, a segment of history in the making which can be boiled down to time. And to be contingent is to be modern. At a time when art is plagued by ethical and theoretical crises, this perception of time and sensibility are rare to come by. But to where would time lead us? Song feels nostalgic for the purity, solemnity and emotional sincerity of the classical period. Yet she also longs for the unbounded imagination of future generations. Perhaps, our return to the past is solely the preparation for a historical upgrade, as it was chanted in Song’s music video for the exhibition this time:

You will return in a pure body / The next synthesis…

Extending related concepts – “Animation Purity”

On the one hand, it comes from the traditional saying that “everything has animism”; on the other hand, it comes from the description of the Buddhist “Oriental Glazed Pure Land”: “a world of pure land that is unimaginable by humans and radiates from its own nature.”

Regarding the oriental pure land, what kind of variants have the image of the spiritual body appeared in the thesis of the labeling of dualism in contemporary society? In contemporary life, the human spirit and body are mixed in traditional nature, various network media information, industry and technology. In the evolution of society, artist Song Kun is interested in the mixed experience of human body, organism and machine order.

In recent years, artist Song Kun has created a new ethnic group “Pan-Spiritual”, each of whom has its own code name. Some of these images are virtualized by the artist using 3D software, and some come from real friends around him. These people travel through the three-dimensional dimensions of the past, present and future. According to different personalities, Song Kun added different elements: traditional Chinese elements (ancient costumes, beasts and auspicious animals), cyberpunk, hip-hop, virtual organisms, natural ocean and universe landscapes, oriental fantasy fairy-tale atmosphere, etc.

The artist is interested in how mixing identities can achieve more human freedom in the realistic context of Chinese contemporary life.