Yang Jian

From “surface” to “volume”, under the discrete reconstruction of digitisation, the virtual world constantly expands and invasively completes the reproduction, modification, and encapsulation of real life. With increasingly blurred boundaries, ambiguous subjects, and pathways continuously closed, reality approaches in reverse towards the visible gradient as in a film projection, and we are truly witnessing a progress of time and a certain kind of retrogression. We begin to realise that Faust surrendered his soul without an exchange, that people compete with Satan’s companions, and that we, as individuals, are now subjected to the immense futility and helplessness that reality imposes on us. Here, Song Kun attempts to reference the concept of The Inexhaustible Treasury to investigate and probe, and establishes two passages, which resemble both the earthly and spiritual world as referred to in Buddhist culture, as well as the depth of perception corresponding to the surface stimuli discussed in Schopenhauer’s explanation, and Aristotle’s position on art as a continuum between the physical and the spirit in On the Soul. The term treasury encompasses both eternal profoundness and endless treasures. Song has internalised the two aspects of treasury into her artistic practice, redefining it as the more conventional yet exhilarating series of “A Thousand Kisses Deep” and “Pure Land”, simultaneously relishing the worlds of the secular and the spiritual. Reflecting on Song’s creative career over the past twenty years, what we perceive is not merely two intertwining threads of codependent growth but also a kind of universal, infinite and enlightening cycle of change. This cycle flows through every part of life in tearing and stitching and constantly generates and dissolves in the intersection between life experiences and spirituality.

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The Inexhaustible Treasury: Buddhist terminology, refers to the Bodhisattva’s boundless virtues, which act on all beings with infinity; it also describes the Sangha’s treasury as “the ten boundless treasuries of a bodhisattva”: faith, morality, conscience, shame, learning, generosity, wisdom, memory, memorising the sutras, eloquence in expounding them.

Fragments of Humanoid

When we examine Song Kun’s artistic career of over twenty years rather systematically, it is easy to notice the human body and portraits as the motifs she has always maintained, regardless of the subject matter or her state of mind. However, it is obvious that the painted objects are often separated physically from the human body and form, whether it is the torso isolated by the use of fragmented images or portraits incorporated with the experience of mixed identities. Song intends to deconstruct the conventional logic of images and narratives, rendering her characters as fragments of humanoids that have been alienated by technological recognition or intelligent segmentation. As this tendency has intensified in recent years, the artist has focused the subjects of her creative research on spiritual creatures with a background of maritime, nomadic culture and religious myths such as mermaids, werewolves, and Chinese immortal heroes, and by embedding elements of Buddhism, ACG culture, and Japanese gravure posters that preoccupy her on the façade of these subjects, she has integrated these scattering cultural elements, not of the same aspect of discourse, into one visual apparatus. Whether it is painting, sculpture, music video, or live DJ, all the mediums invoke human spirituality and the return of nature while severing the viewer’s basic fantasy derived from mundane images of the human body and its connection to secular inhibitions, thus propelling the possibilities to a broader horizon of imagination.

Hunting the Self

Significantly, this interruption of habitual nature sometimes resides not in the mere depiction of an object but in the artist’s perception of self and the external world, where Song Kun persistently functions as a variable of the topological boundaries. Self-portraits, on the other hand, serve as a mechanism for introspection throughout Song’s work. Taking the self as the hunting target, she records the changes on multiple dimensions in her self-portraits and simultaneously places the discussion of painting techniques behind the classic art historical issue of self-portrait, allowing the sensitive delivery of her own changes to be captured more intuitively by the viewer. Thus, these works extend beyond the visual separation and establish an emotional depth that spans across the latitude.

Stigmata of Time and Space

On the basis of such a research methodology and consistent work, the artist compels the viewer to focus on the message expressed by the body itself. Here, despite the knowledge of Song Kun’s structure of interest, it would be too arbitrary and superficial to reduce the emergence of these images simply to the “aesthetics of glitches” in cyber aesthetics as a result of the intervention of digital perspectives, or to the “iconography of desire”. A more accurate and comprehensive understanding of Song Kun’s works can only be formed by combining her creative practice of over twenty years with the underlying classical aesthetic logic and by expanding her perspective to the entirety of art history. The artist’s subjective emphasis on the body and the texture of technological language itself, as well as the shift in perspective following the introduction of technology into painting, connects the classics of art historical visual conventions, thus transplanting the psychological distress associated with the classical stigmata into a series of work in the contemporary context. This, coupled with Song’s experimentation and subversion of the self, interrupts the painterly habitual nature that comes from her exquisite and extraordinary talent. With or without intention, a series of methods originally designed to oppose traditional restraints have generated new violations, coercion, restrictions, and harm, accompanied by religious self-sacrifice and the visual and painful sensation of the stigmata in martyrdom, gradually leading to a new kind of contemporary visual baptism. By accessing the logic of art history’s classic images into her personal system of images, Song Kun escapes from the traditional mindset of emotional and psychological analyses, connecting her work to the vastness of historical time and space, thus completing the torment and entanglement of humanity’s commonality and eternity and addressing the direct expression of materiality and pain.

Harnessing the Spirit

In the artist’s extensive series of works based on the grand fictional space-time structure of the Sukhavati “Pure Land”, elements of science fiction, fantasy, religion, ACG subcultural, and nature form an organic combination and collaborate to create a symbolic structure. Aware that both religious and current technological aesthetics will become relics in the world of the future, Song’s projects also emphasise the materiality of the perceptions and the senses of sight and touch, along with the attention to the details of formality. Often carnal yet rational, brutal yet tender, these subjects reveal the artist’s fascination with the interplay of beauty and evil, eroticism and purification, and evoke a certain panpsychic worldview with an archaeological undertone from the future. In addition, in Song Kun’s creator-like system, she constructs “cyborg bodies” that mix identity and form to emphasise the virtuality and tension inherent in biological existence, articulating the complex relationship between nature and popular culture within the panpsychist framework. As such, Song Kun’s creator-like depictions of bodies have a certain materiality that transcends any conceptualisation. The process of building the flesh and blood of these bodies with a sense of illusion becomes more like a transformation and revolution of cultural life.

Portraits of Instincts

In contrast, “A Thousand Kisses Deep”, centred on everyday portraits, is the most intimate and tender personal thread embedded in the depths of Song Kun’s mind. The artist excels in the use of tactile painting techniques to delineate layers of private fragmented narratives, where profound and genuine emotions intersect and collectively fabricate evocative images, and when these private portraits are presented in public settings for viewing, internal and external spaces intertwine while phantasmagoric visions infiltrate the tangible world. In this process, she curtails the sharpness of a fantasist – manifesting the mundane side of the world – and instead exposes the veneer of appearances with the sincerest paintings, music, lyrics, and images in order to reveal something sublime, instinctive, and deeply engrossing. These paintings and images, replete with Song’s specific forms, introduce us to nostalgic yet classic private emotions as a significant and enduring aspect of global culture and derive from them the simultaneity of certain contradictory ideas, such as reflection and contemplation, detachment and profound affection.

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Whether it is “A Thousand Kisses Deep” from vivid and personal perceptions or “Pure Land” that transcends reality, the two distinctly opposite approaches of depicting the body and the cortex “treasured” in this exhibition unveil the critical nature of the body and the “self” underlying its references in different cultures. Here, the body does not only serve as a personalised measure of life but also an intersection of past and present, of collective and individual experience. Song Kun explores the creative threads of the past, present, and future that span over twenty years and a time-space disposition, expands the possibilities of viewing as well as visual and touching sense in the exhibition “Infinity” with visual forms, and further develops the perceptive thresholds beyond which it can cover. The artist seems to have articulated the intertwined emotional threads of her personal creative career under this transcendent yet tangible concept, no longer obsessing over the reconciliation between reality and the spiritual world, not seeking a distinct separation and divorcing of the self. Just like the monastic debate in Vajrayana Buddhism and the reincarnation in The Six Paths, the debate and reincarnation are both the original intention and the essence, extracted from and dedicated to the treasury, subjecting the generation and dissolution to eternity and infinity.