– Lu Mingjun

2019

I

At a time when many of her peers are intentionally avoiding, even resisting the academy system, Song Kun has not. She does not see the training and education she received at the academy as the enemy. In fact, she believes these traditional techniques and skills are a source of nourishment and balance to her intellect and aesthetic. To this day, she still stubbornly obsesses over these traditional techniques, over concrete forms, over the eternal lyrical beauty of Botticelli and the sense of flow of “Cao’s robes rising from the water” in ancient Chinese art.

Song Kun uses the term “xiezhen” (“true portrayal”) to sum up her practice. This term, often used interchangeably in Chinese with “portrait,” encompasses multiple layers of meaning. We can trace it back to the concept of the “portrait” in ancient Chinese tradition, which was synonymous with such terms as “xiezhao” and “chuanshen.” As Liu Xie of the Southern Dynasties period wrote in The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons in the chapter titled Emotion and Literary Expression, “That which is written for emotion is concise and gives a true portrayal (xiezhen), while that which is written for the sake of writing is vulgarly flamboyant and excessive.” Evidently, Liu Xie’s concept of “true portrayal” refers not only to a faithful depiction, but also the refinement of emotion and fortitude. For Song Kun, this is naturally not a simple retracing of history. What she cares about is the relationship Liu Xie describes between “true portrayal” and “concision.” This is also where she differs from the ordinary realism of the academy: Song Kun hopes to develop a new aesthetic on a foundation of realism. In fact, each painting has an object and an image motif. To this end, Song Kun spends a great deal of time and effort searching for and reconstructing various related objects and image materials, sometimes employing everyday candid photography. The resulting pictures include objects and figures painted from life, as well as translated images, along with no shortage of products of her imagination and fabrication. The key is in how these image elements are synthesized. In this sense, one could say that Song Kun uses her own practice to reappraise the application of iconography in contemporary painting. In any case, when we hear the word “xiezhen” today, the first thing that comes to mind is not the ancient sense of “true portrayal,” or the realism of the academy, but the portrait photography collections popular in Japan. The term, pronounced “shashin” in Japanese, was originally synonymous with photography and photographs, but in our minds, it has always been linked to Japanese pop culture, associated with such things as AV (adult video) and dolls. In this way, the characters for “xiezhen/shashin” have become a recognizable sign and schema in and of themselves. This can also explain why she would choose the visual kei SD and BJD dolls (as well as cyborgs and BDSM figures), equally popular in Japanese culture, as objects of depiction, because they, like AV and dolls, are constructed and shaped by a particular gaze of desire.

SD (Super Dollfie) is a line of ball-jointed dolls released by the Japanese company Volks in 1998. BJD is a general term for ball-jointed dolls. They can take on all manner of lifelike poses, and can also be dressed in various costumes and cosmetics, with interchangeable hands, hair, and eyes, and assigned various narrative plots. Like cyborgs, they lie between craft and nature. They are both living things and machines, part of the same derivative system. Song Kun’s choice to use them as painting motif and object of depiction is not just out of aesthetic awareness, but also due to their ability to be assigned various characters and identities. It appears she prefers to view them as corporeal mirrors onto the existential reality of the individual or even contemporary man. This series of practices also reminds us that there are certain latent connections between the ball-jointed dolls and “portrait collections” popular in Japan and throughout Asia. We would do well to consider these dolls as a form of “portrait/xiezhen”—a blended form of portraiture to be precise, except that this “portraiture” is not photographic but is instead closer to Li Xie’s “concise and true portrayal.” Japan’s “figure portraits” treat people as objects of mass aesthetic appreciation, or things, even dolls, just like the ball-jointed dolls. Song Kun, however, is different. In these dolls, she sees a breath of life and light of spirit. For this reason, in Song Kun’s eyes they are not playthings; they are a form of life, intimate friends on which she can rely. They do not demand or desire anything from people, and people can control them, but who’s to say that people are not being controlled as well? Does not this obsession with dolls amount to being controlled? For instance, the rise of the “otaku” is rooted in this, which Song Kun alludes to with her divisions and dislocations in the painting, and the metal chains installed alongside them.

II

Evidently, Song Kun’s corporealized psychological rearrangement, the so called “Imbody,” is not just the corporealization of the dolls, nor is it just in order to draw attention to humanity’s existing logic of “embodiment” and cyborg aesthetics. Just as the double entendre in the term “Imbody” implies—it is both “embody” (to make physical or corporeal), as well as “I’m body” (flesh in itself)—in a certain sense, the artist’s reappraisal of the body and its subjectivity is in order to liberate these dolls from their state of being controlled, and to bestow them with a new living form that transcends that of people and of dolls. This new living form maintains the existing social (industrial) logic and order between people and dolls, while also infusing it with a layer of transparency and aura that transcends this structure and logic.

Song Kun has found an aesthetic meeting point between Botticelli and these doll forms, but she has not directly imported Botticelli’s techniques here, instead only making partial use of flat brushstrokes and outlines. In any case, Song Kun is not depicting invisible forms. To the contrary, they all have basis in concrete motifs. These bases provide a foundation in reality, rather than an ideal archetype. Song Kun’s depictions maintain precise generalization, a generalization that is at once rooted in her fluency in realist techniques, and also more than a little inspired by the minimalistic splashed ink of such Southern Song dynasty Zen painters as Mu Xi and Liang Kai. It is in the latter that she found a transcendent resonance. It is also an “animizing” generalization, one which keeps its distance from Botticelli’s meticulous detail. Of course, this does not imply that Song Kun has discarded details altogether. To the contrary, she is quite focused on capturing individual parts and finer aspects of the body, which is where the life and emotions of the subjects of her depictions manifest. They manifest in such places as the figure’s gaze, the gaps between the fingers, creases in clothing, the unseen depths of the heart, even in specific marks of the brush. These self-sufficient details are often impossible to control, or places where the artist gives up control, or perhaps one could say they are the leftover fragments of life in a controlled body. They form an extreme contrast with the equally highlighted naked mechanical joints. This contrast is uniform through color and brushwork. Her customary technique is to refine a sense of transparency or translucence from gray tones. This “transparent gray” embodies a sense of the mechanical, while also bestowing the forms in the painting with a unique sense of life.

Aby Warburg said, “God is in the details.” Warburg’s doctoral thesis was on Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Primavera. In his essay, he profoundly revealed Botticelli’s expressions of life in motion and the “youth, beauty, love, death and grief” behind it ¹. Though Song Kun has not read Warburg, she has captured the aesthetics of motion and living forms of “Cao’s robes rising from the water” in the details of The Birth of Venus and Primavera, and her own depictions carry this same beauty and youth, love and death as well. In fact, “chimera” images first appeared long ago, in Mesopotamia in the second millennium BCE. Such images emerged again repeatedly in ancient Egyptian and Greek art. These forms represent a divine force that can drive evil from the mortal world. Based on this, we could say that Song Kun uses doll, machine and cyborg bodies to replace the animal side of the chimera, while retaining the human side, which is likewise filled with the light of life. For Song Kun, they are neither dolls nor beasts but perhaps an animized race of future beings, beings fusing the genes of dolls and humans. Perhaps, for the artist, they represent humanity’s destiny, or are already humanity’s reality.

Like many artists who moved to Beijing from elsewhere, Song Kun has moved home more times than she can count in recent years. Her three-person family has almost grown accustomed to this migratory state, even numb to it. Born in Inner Mongolia, Song Kun is no stranger to the nomadic life. She may have grown up in a city, but the naturalist culture of northern China exerts a profound influence on her. In her youth, she often dreamed of the non-pretentiousness and freedom of the “vast skies, open lands and wind blowing across the herds on the grasslands” from that familiar folk song. Years later, however, she discovered that the (post) human social project had utterly transformed this pure land of ideals. She has no intention of grieving over this reality, or of conceiving a utopia. She is more concerned with how to perceive and depict this reality. Perhaps it was precisely this experience of growing up in Inner Mongolia that drew her unconsciously to view “Imbody” as a new race.

III

Song Kun is no feminist. She keeps a wary distance from radical feminist manifestos and actions, even tires of them, but that does not mean she ascribes to patriarchy. To the contrary, her practice bears the marks of gender everywhere. Virtually all of the cyborg bodies she depicts are female. This is of course also because women have long been the objects of the gaze, objects of power and control. One could say that the images of women in every era are constructed by the male gaze. This fits with the shaping of the Super Dollfies and ball-jointed dolls, which is determined to a great extent by the gaze and aesthetic leanings of the masses, constructed by the gaze, products of social (consumption) engineering. For this reason, Song Kun’s depictions do not only highlight the subjectivity of the body itself, but also reappraise women as a social role and their passive and fragile side. In this particular regard, they are no different from the dolls. This is what draws the artist in, and this is what bestows her actions with energy and rich imagination.

Song Kun pays little heed to the art system, and holds out no hope for this system, or the world, becoming any better. “Man is everywhere in chains” (Rousseau). This is perhaps why she has grown increasingly interested in the structure of the human body. In 2016, during a forty day residency at an art institution in a former Berlin women’s prison, she had a much deeper experience and perception of the confinement of the body, of punishment and resistance, of order and dissent, and of the natural properties of gender and social identity. The layout of this latest exhibition (IMBODY – Feeling Real · Nude, 2019) also clearly incorporates various elements of a prison scene. The walls of the exhibition space are painted in a light flesh tone, blending with the female bodies in the paintings, and various industrial chains, chrome control panels and instruments (medical or sexual) are hung around the space, alongside the binding of the body, all coming together to form connotations of bondage porn. In this way, a magical chemical reaction takes place between the two extremes of the desire and confinement of the body. This is the source of inspiration for the concept of “Imbody.” Perhaps, as the artist sees it, there is no essential difference between the contemporary art exhibition space mechanism, which has descended into a commercial production line, and prisons and BDSM spaces: they are all products of human complexity.

It is just like the fascinating relationship between the body structure of ball-jointed dolls and people. Song Kun says, “You can dress them up and pose them however you want, but you can’t change their basic structure or range of motion without completely breaking them.”² The human body is actually the same. It is often being controlled or toyed with, but as long as it does not exceed the inherent limited freedom, it can continue to survive. The music video Looping (2019), featured in this exhibition, is undoubtedly the best footnote to this series. In the video, a popping³ dancer mixes cyborg, shadow boxing, cosplay and other various movement styles and performance forms to the rhythm of the music, accompanied by the minimalist lyrics—“eat me, kid me, imprison me, copy me”—in a mechanical reproduction of the poses the artist creates. Though the body in the music video has not been completely homogenized and transformed by social (consumption) engineering, and still retains its physical properties as flesh, it remains in a certain state of confinement. But what Song Kun wishes to convey is that even so, we can still feel the body’s limited freedom. And this has made her increasingly firm in her belief that a person’s vitality is determined by their tenacity and circuitous wisdom. This is not so much the predicament and fate of the body as it is the basic motivation and strategy of survival. As Christoph Wulf said, “Since ancient times, people have always used the body to obtain the human image. This image of the body is the image of humanity, just as human performance is always bodily performance.” ⁴

Three years ago, in the exhibition Asura Sukhavati (2016), Song Kun fabricated an island. In her eyes, this island was not just the pure land, it was also the human realm, as well as hell. To this day, her art remains rooted in this keen sense of reality. She has created a series of illusory people, an illusion of neither past nor present, but a vivid vision of the current reality. It is just like this city in which she lives. The class divisions of society as a body are the same in nature as the divisions in a psychological break. This is another layer of implied meaning in Cyborg Body, Hierarchical Dislocation. In fact, the nude (gray) tones of the paintings, the division and dislocation of the images, and the sense of distance all allude to this mechanical, estranged world. For Song Kun, painting is a carrier for reality and a spiritual outlet, and because of this, her practice has never departed from the self-referential mechanisms of painting. As discussed above, she feels that it is not difficult to resist or discard conventions. What is difficult is finding room to move forward within conventional language and aesthetics. It is the same with our bodies. “Dancing in shackles” is itself the convention, even if it is one that is under constant attack.

1.Wu Qiong, “Shangdi Zhu Zai Xijie Zhong”—Abi-Waerbao Tuxiangxue de Sixiang Mailuo (“God is in the Details”—The Conceptual Thread of Aby Warburg’s Iconography) part 1, in Xifang Wenming Zaixian (Western Civilization Online) online journal, retrieved October 9, 2019, http://www.zfwmw.com/node/1054

2.Lu Mingjun, Discussion with Song Kun, September 11, 2019, Song Kun Studio, Beijing, unpublished.

3.Popping is rooted in a mime performance of robot movements known as “robot style” that involves controlling the tension and relaxation of various muscles and joints to produce a “wave” or “pop” effect. Incorporating such street dance styles as the “robot” and “wave,” this is a style of movement that combines freedom and order.

4.Christoph Wulf, Bilder des Menschen: Imaginäre und performative Gundlagen der Kultur, Chen Hongyan, trans., Peng Zhengmei, proof, Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, 2018, p. 57.

– Bao Dong

2018.Beijing

The art of Song Kun encompasses two very different cultures. The first is the classicalist culture that has been preserved and passed down by academy education, which is embodied in her artistic character and taste as expressed in her paintings. This not only includes her precise sketching, rational modeling, sliver-gray palette, and her control of the paint to give it just the right level of materiality; it also includes her preferences for portraiture and figures. Depictions of people, and particularly closeups of faces and hands, are always appearing in her works, and this is where we really see her academy modeling skills.

On the other, perhaps opposing side of this aesthetic taste for reason, precision and elegance, is the subcultural content of the times in her works: anime, cosplay, experimental electronica and cyberpunk. It is of course not difficult to understand the incorporation of this content. As is the case for most artists of her generation, these contemporary cultural resources provide her with the momentum and nourishment she needs to escape the pressure of academy traditions and gain a sense of individual identity. Unlike many of her peers, however, Song Kun does not belong to any of the tag-line schools of “anime aesthetics.” Her works do not have that icon exaggeration or Pop appropriation, which is perhaps because she is actually truly of that culture, rather than a bystander making strategic use of it.

If the academy classicism brings restraint and elegance, then what popular subculture provides is trendiness and coolness. Song Kun’s works effect an astonishing combination of the two, as we see in one work featuring a girl dressed as a character from Inuyasha, with the precise costume design of an anime spirit, but also the classic clothing textural style of “Cao’s robes rising from the water.” Implied within this rendering of “Cao’s robes rising from the water” is Song Kun’s focus on modeling the twisting form of the body, as well as the classicalist focus on outline drawing and sculptural feel. Using a classical eye, Song Kun has transformed contemporary imagery into a style that is hers alone. In this sense, she resembles Constantine Guys as described by Charles Baudelaire, a painter who finds the timeless within fleeting and random modern life.

The Chinese artists born in the 1970s are part of a generation that has perhaps truly encountered the urban modernity described by Baudelaire. They bear the imprint of Socialist culture, but have also been truly situated within a rapidly capitalizing society, especially during their youth. They may not have had a clear “enemy” as the previous generation did, but they have intimately felt powerful experiential tension, and have been forced to rapidly change and adjust their thinking and mindset until each of them could settle on a relatively stable individual worldview in order to finally make peace with the world.

For Song Kun, this making peace with the world is perhaps completed in her artworks. Academism and Pop, orthodoxy and subculture, classical and contemporary, conservative and radical all seem to have become unified under a conceptual system we could call pan-Buddhism. The concepts and aesthetics of Buddhism are precisely what allow her to see the timeless in the present. Many of her artwork and exhibition titles lift phrasing from Buddhism. The vivid colors subdued under gray tones are also in line with the Buddhist glass-sheened depiction of the Pure Land. The figures in her paintings also have a touch of the dignity and solemnity of Buddhist iconography. Whether it is the East or the West, Song Kun prefers the simple beauty of ancient times. In fact, the “Cao’s robes rising from the water” approach to clothing textures is one of the basic modes of early Chinese Buddhist art, and can be traced back to the art of the Hellenistic period.

For most people today, Buddhist faith provides an escapist mindset from worldly life, and that possibly applies to Song Kun as well. Her woks are not Buddhist art meant to serve Buddhist thought and doctrines. The relationship between Song Kun and her works is more like the relationship between the literati and Zen painting. Her works are an overall presentation of individual concepts and tastes, while the “Buddhistness” can be seen as a rejection and retreat from various vulgarities and shortcomings of the present. In other words, in today’s world flooded with cool pictures, Song Kun uses classicalism in the cultural history sense to reach a coolness beyond cool.

http://songkun.org/zh/2019/03/06/泛灵净界-%E3%80%82o-o/

— Lu Mingjun

Asura-gati is one of the six realms of Buddhism, a realm that is neither heavenly nor earthly, of beings between gods, demons and humanity. The demigods of this realm have the desires of humans, as well as the power of gods and the evil propensities of demons. They are good in nature, but are also often hateful, and persistently get entangled in struggles. Asuras can be male or female. Unlike the males, who have a distorted, ugly appearance, female Asuras are beautiful and alluring, standing as an impediment to personal cultivation.

In fact, in today’s so called “post-human era” of fusion between natural and artificial, biological and mechanical, a paradigm shift has taken place in the carrier of the image of the Asura. The Internet, cosplay, folk beliefs and many other elements have intertwined, forming an unfathomable new image for the Asura. The artist sees this image as having the weight of truth in the real world. Song Kun attempts to turn these imaginary things into tangible, visible things. She bases her depictions on the various forms of Asuras in Buddhism throughout history and around the world, referencing subcultural motifs such as cosplay and ball-jointed dolls in hopes of finding certain possible connections between religious faith, manipulated dolls and everyday experience.

Boris Groys made the profound observation that in the digital era, the Internet has become a new pathway for the dissemination of religious faith. Meanwhile, the Internet itself has become a form of faith. Faith is invisible, and digital files are invisible as well, hidden in the same way. What Groys did not mention, however, is that the Internet is itself a modern variant of Indra’s net. The endless connections and reactions between all things is a trait of Indra’s net. This is not different, in any essential way, from the Internet. This also tells us that Asura is not just a Buddhist concept. It is also a dimensional category of existence. More importantly, its nature and the role it plays in Buddhist reasoning corresponds to today’s subcultures, naturally taking on a certain role in subculture narratives. On one hand, computer games and the Internet have become messengers for the will of the Asuras, as well as a pathway for penetrating human nature and social reality. On the other hand, the subculture mediums that disseminate this will of the Asuras have themselves permeated our everyday life, becoming hidden controllers, or transforming into a form of faith. Song Kun uses her own artistic methods to extract this will of the Asuras from within in order to look back on the subculture mediums and capitalist industrial system that spread this will.

Song Kun has devised this exhibition as an island. For her, this island is at once a pure land, the mortal coil and the realm of hell. It is the past, present and future. It is the land of the Asuras, as well as the reality in which ball-jointed dolls exist, and the artist’s refuge. In the essay What is the Contemporary, Giorgio Agamben says that this island already surpasses the realm of our experience, but every existence and occurrence upon it seems to be gazing back at the obscure parts of our experience. Song Kun has no intention of speaking of Agamben’s “contemporary,” or of a dematerialized Buddhist pure land. Instead, she aims to create a “pure realm” in the world of the subconscious.

Thus, Asura is only a part of Song Kun’s solo exhibition. The exhibition also includes the “six messengers of Ksitigarbha,” people in the sea of darkness, animals from the beast realm (jellyfish, snakes and octopuses), scenes from the pure land, a fabricated pure land island installation, and videos and music with primal themes such as the starry sky and the sea, for a total of seven different components.

Like the Asura series, Six Messengers of Ksitigarbha is also a series of paintings that employs readymade collage methods. These six messengers lack the fierceness and resplendence of those recorded in traditional murals, and also resemble images of ball-jointed dolls and cosplay. In the process of shaping her figures, Song Kun uses flat brushstrokes that remove color contrasts, reducing them to what appears to be a faintly discernible rainbow shrouded in gray smog, emphasizing the block structures of industrial production and the surface feel of plastic. Without being told, we likely would not imagine that she is depicting a Buddhist image, but this is indeed the real world image of the six messengers of Ksitigarbha in her eyes. At this time, their original world is no longer pure and natural, and the light of the Buddha symbolized by the rainbow has been shrouded in smog, only revealing faint glimpses in some layers. This is reminding us that the mission of the six messengers is to watch over the “six paths.” Here, however, there is no specific narrative relationship between the Asuras and the six messengers. The Asuras, aside from possessing some self-projection, are compositional elements in the “pure realm” as Song Kun imagines it. This is why the exoteric traditions of Mahayana, rather than the esoteric, attract her. The cultivation methods of the former often utilize pure chanting, worship and confession, while the latter utilize certain behaviors or rituals of the body, language and thoughts. As a method and path to cultivation, Song Kun’s creation of a “pure realm” has no requirement of ritual and form, but is instead firmly rooted in everyday experience. In this light, it seems to have some similarities to certain Zen insights. This also explains why so many Buddhist figures in her paintings have been transformed into ball-jointed dolls and self-images. Here, art, life and faith are one.

It is particularly important to mention certain motifs that repeatedly emerge in her paintings, such as the jellyfish, snake and octopus. These three animals are all highly intelligent, and have certain primal instincts and personalities similar to humans. For instance, jellyfish have mysteriously soft exteriors, but they are venomous, and will strike back at attacks from the outside. It is the same with the snake, which is recorded in religious and traditional visual systems as a symbol of avarice and evil. The octopus is not venomous, but it is highly intelligent, and can even change its color like a chameleon, as well as its structure, echoing man’s ability to deceive. In the physical sense, these beings are components of the “pure realm” island, as well as parts of the tainted real world, but I think that more importantly, these beings are subtle references to Song Kun’s own psychological mechanisms. Take the jellyfish, for example, which is beautiful, but also deadly. This calls to mind the film Seven Pounds (2008) by director Gabriele Muccino, in which Tim Thomas, the protagonist, chooses to commit suicide by jellyfish. Thomas says, “In seven days, God created the world, and in seven seconds, I shattered mine.” Perhaps the jellyfish is a metaphor for that “seven pounds of redemption” alluded to in the film. Coincidentally, Song Kun’s overall plan has seven components. Buddhism (especially exoteric Zen Buddhism) and psychoanalysis (like that of Jacques Lacan) share a psychological therapy approach that is a rupture, perhaps a form of “death.” Interestingly, Song Kun’s so called island or “pure realm” is also rooted in such a separation.

We can see that I am seeking out latent threads between these artworks, but Song Kun reminded me that she had no intention to construct a narrative, and even consciously broke off the possible connections between the elements described above. She would prefer to see them as a series of unconnected signs or symbols. It is precisely these signs that compose the “pure realm” in Song Kun’s heart. This “pure realm” is no longer some oriental fairyland, or a poeticized naturalist outlook. It is not “naturalism” or the “pure land” in the traditional sense. It appears chaotic, but it radiates strangeness and vitality. It is just as Ksitigarbha said, that hell is the pure land. The pure land gained from seeing the truth is far away, as well as right in front of your eyes.

Song Kun views the entire exhibition plan as an “island.” Meanwhile, she has created an “island” installation reminiscent of a Tang dynasty territory map in the center of the exhibition space. Though painting has no lack of symbols and allusions to reality, its properties as a medium determine that it will always be limited to a certain pattern logic of viewing. In comparison, installation, video and sound artworks not only present a living theater that transcends time and space, they also bring viewers inside them. Song Kun views this artwork as a scene of an island laid to waste by human decadence and the fall of civilization, presenting the viewer with a naked view of hell. Dissected fragments of human bodies are scattered across it, including a fetus still in the womb, a crystallized skull, brains, scattered bones, limbs and mutated organs, alongside glimmering neon tubes and other materials. The use of modern industrial materials such as silicone and resin, and a design evoking rubble, make this appear to be the ruins of a modern industrial culture. The Tang dynasty territory map shape also has strong connotations here, alluding to the spread and rise of Buddhism in China and standing as a symbol of religious culture, corresponding to today’s age of Dharma-decline.

We are no strangers to similar sights. We often encounter them in disaster films and computer games. Where Song Kun’s creation differs is that, first, the readymade objects and their material nature radiate with the sense of touch, and second, the creation provides us with a bird’s-eye view. At this time, the objects scattered on the ground join together with the paintings and videos around them to create a panoramic view of hell. Meanwhile, the bird’s-eye perspective itself is meaningful. I see it as according with certain behaviors or rituals of the practice of Buddhism or cultivation, bestowed with awe and reverence for life, death and time.

It looks like a future archaeological site, but Song Kun is unwilling to place it within a linear temporal dimension. From the beginning, she scrambles this distinction, her intent being to create a hybrid scene. In this sense, these objects or signs symbolize things that are happening contemporaneously. As she has said, today, smog, the loneliness of the virtual world, the explosion of diverse information, manmade “artificial nature” and “masked performances” are mixing together with the original appearance of primal nature and human nature, creating many hybrid forms. Her true interest lies in these hybrid forms, and these are the source of her imagination. Thus, it is unavoidable that such contrasts would be imbued with social implications. It is apparent, however, that her goal is not to present indicators of reality. What she truly cares about is the emotional impact, insight, wisdom and imagination that such an imagination of time and space can bring us. For the viewer, it is not necessarily alluring, and might even evoke repulsion or indifference. For this reason, we can say that this is entirely a personal world for Song Kun. Bizarrely, this imaginary world or “pure realm” always has a strong feel of realism.

Works Link：

ASURA SUKHAVATI 2016

– Philip Tinari
(Director, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art)

Song Kun is a painter of surfaces, of mental states, of fleeting feelings, and of lingering symbols. She was born at the front end of a generation that is only now coming into its own–after the death of Mao, just before the rise of Deng, and reared into the rising tide of consumer subjectivity and individual differentiation that marked the 1980s. The defining characterization of this generation is perhaps its schizophrenia–caught forever between systems, between regulations, indeed, between worlds. And faced with what seems to most like a very good thing, societies produce artists who explore alternative propositions, proposing ways of thinking and being that lie beyond widely accepted confines.

A Thousand Kisses Deep, shows how far her explorations have taken her in the intervening years.
The inspiration for the exhibition’s title comes from a 1967 song by Leonard Cohen which triangulates sex, depression, and anomie into a series of abstract situations that form, collectively, a picture of urban angst. The song cycles ambivalently among the second, first, and third persons, never quite sure where its most effective register might lie. As anyone who has both spent time in a corporate setting here over the past few years and dipped into the television series Mad Men can attest, there are shared conditions and obsessions between 1960s New York and 2010s Beijing. Unsettled dichotomies, shifting relations, and inflating fortunes breed specific pathologies. Isolation, one might surmise, becomes more intense against a backdrop of exuberance. The bubbly onset is the loneliest part.

Song Kun and her collaborators are not the first generation of Chinese artists to look at the city as a site for the uncanny. Indeed, the Post-Sense Sensibility formation, in whose footsteps she and her N12 generation follow chronologically if not stylistically, saw the upsetting potential of contemporary city life as a starting point for their often radical explorations. The subtitle of that group’s first exhibition in 1999–“Alien Bodies and Delusion”–could almost function as the name for the present project. But where those artists saw a deeply political, or at least sociological, undercurrent to their every gesture–if only in that they felt the need to justify their work as not being about such larger themes —we instead have here a feast of ambiguity and uncertainty, a paean to the ineffable lightness of a city on the move, and a testament to the acuity of this one observer of contemporary life in China.

Works Link

http://songkun.org/2018/02/08/a-thousand-kisses-deep-2012/

Beyond the Text – A Short Essay on the Work of the Artist Song Kun

— Paul Gladston

Since its inception during the late 1970s, contemporary Chinese art has been marked by an often conspicuous bringing together of Western and Chinese cultural influences. This has not only involved the persistent assimilation of existing forms of Western modernist and post-modernist art in response to the localized concerns of an autochthonous Chinese art world (most notably, a desire to go beyond the stultifying academicism and ideological conformity of “official” Chinese art), but also, in effect, a re-visiting of vernacular non-rationalist Chinese cultural thought and practice as previously mediated by the Western avant-gardes as part of their attempts to engage critically with the means-end rationality of modern life. Consider here, for example, with regard to the latter Western Dada and Surrealism’s use of chance based techniques similar to those associated with the divinatory practices of the I Ching. As a consequence, contemporary Chinese art can be understood to resist any settled form of interpretation by simultaneously inviting readings from multi-cultural more than one cultural point of view.

In the face of this resistance, there has been a tendency among Western art historians and critics to view contemporary Chinese art as a suitably indeterminate focus for contemporary postmodernist/poststructuralist theory. [i] Indeed, this position has been given further weight by Chinese artists and intellectuals such as Huang Yongping and Hou Hanru who have actively sought to bring Western postmodernist/poststructuralist theory together with aspects of traditional, non-rationalist Chinese thoughts and practice as a combined means of interpreting contemporary Chinese art. [ii] Read in relation to this particular interpretative point of view, contemporary Chinese art can be understood to act as a pervasively deconstructive form of “third-space” whose unsettling uncertainty extends beyond questions of its own identity to encompass the conditions under which art is shown as part of a contemporary globalized art market; conditions which invariably sustain – as a necessary consequence of institutional discourse – unduly narrow, culturally inflected views of the significance of contemporary Chinese art.

Despite this accompanying sense of uncertainty, contemporary Chinese art has nevertheless established a strongly defined profile on the international stage. Principally, this is due to the development of a signature approach towards the making of visual artworks – particularly by the generation of Chinese artists who first came to prominence during the 1980s and 1990s – in which techniques characteristic of the Western avant-gardes and post avant-gardes such as, large-scale painting, video installation, collage-montage and performance habitually serve as a vehicle for the re-presentation of iconic images and objects that have become strongly associated in the collective global imagination with the history of Chinese culture, society and politics – not least, the political imagery of mainland China’s revolutionary past. Notable examples of this approach include the “Political Pop” and “Cynical Realist” paintings of Wang Guangyi, Yue Minjun and Zhang Xiao Gang as well as re-motivations of classical vernacular Chinese imagery by artists such as Xu Bing and Huang Yongping. The established standing of contemporary Chinese art is, therefore, somewhat paradoxical insofar as it can be seen to combine cultural hybridity with an instantly recognizable veneer of “Chineseness”.

This unresolved, and, it has to be said, increasingly formulaic (market-friendly) bringing together of cultural hybridity and iconic Chinese imagery is strongly tied to the particular concerns of the artists who first produced it, all of whom had direct experience of the Cultural Revolution as well as China’s increasing openness to outside influences following the confirmation of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms at the XI Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in December 1988. For this generation two contradictory imperatives can be understood to have driven their work as artists. The first, carried over from the Cultural Revolution, was an abiding sense that all human activity (work), whether cultural or social, should be turned actively towards the collective political interests of the Chinese people. The second was the emergence in the wake of Deng’s reforms of a pressing, officially sanctioned drive to open up cultural, social and economic spaces beyond the pervasively restrictive ideology of China’s revolutionary pastThe work of Chinese artists of the eighties and nineties generation is in many ways an embodiment of this contradictory affairs, combining inconclusively as it so often does a desire both for absolute freedom of artistic self-expression (as exemplified by the work of the Western avant-gardes) and the continuing subordination of cultural production to the material concerns of socio-economic and political life (as inherited from direct experience of life in China under Mao Zedong).

For a younger generation of Chinese artists who have come to prominence during the last decade or so and whose lived experience does not encompass the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath things are, however, somewhat different. Within the historical purview of this new generation the immanence of the political to the everyday has waned significantly in the face of China’s increasingly widespread involvement in market driven economic and social reform. With regard to which, it has become both possible and desirable for artists to engage in forms of cultural production that no longer have any strong or direct relationship to older forms of collective political/social action. Consequently, the distinctively politicised combination of Western avant-garde technique and iconic Chinese imagery that once dominated contemporary Chinese art, has now given way, in part at least, to work which makes little or no use of the iconic imagery of China’s revolutionary and immediate post-revolutionary past. In some cases this is because artists have begun to shift their focus away from the significance of that which is represented towards the consequences of representation itself, and in particular the effects of new digital reproductive technologies, many of which can be seen as culturally Asian in origin. In others, it is because the imagery that their work presents relates so closely to the minutiae of everyday day life in China that it no longer carries with it – for an international/non-local audience, at least – immediately recognisable connotations of Chineseness. Furthermore, this same generation is one that would also appear, both through its artistic practice and published statements, to have only scant interest in the Western(ised) forms of postmodernist/poststructuralist theory which once so strongly informed the interpretation of contemporary Chinese art. In place of which is an emphatic sense – often encountered by the present author in interviews with younger Chinese artists – that the production and reception of art cannot and should not be de-limited by pre-established theoretical concepts whether Western or Chinese in origin.

One of the most notable exponents of these shifting attitudes towards artistic production and reception in mainland China is the artist Song Kun. Song Kun was born in Inner Mongolia in 1977,moved to Beijing when she was 14 years old, She has no direct experience of the politically volatile events of the Cultural Revolution and the early years of China’s post Maoist reforms, By contrast, the artist’s life has been dominated by an increasingly precipitous program of industrialization and modernization predicated not on increased rural productivity, as had been the case in relation to China’s Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, but instead on an ever-widening openness to inward investment and, therefore, outside economic, social and cultural influences. In addition to which, Song Kun was educated in the prestigious oil painting department of the Central Academy of Fine arts in Beijing where she was able to develop a prodigious facility for naturalistic drawing and painting within an environment that still values this particular mode of artistic production Song ‘s response to these prevailing circumstances has seen the production of a body of work that is distinguished by the way in which it focuses closely on the artist’s everyday experience – including memories of the past, projections of the future and in some cases dream-like fantasies – rather than on the wider sweep of socio-economic and political life in contemporary China. Moreover, it is one whose evidently complex and overlapping set of stylistic influences, which range from traditional Chinese Shan-Shui (ink and brush) landscape painting through to European realism and East-Asian animé, effectively blur any sharply contrasting sense of cultural hybridity.

One of the most ambitious examples of Song Kun’s work as an artist is the painting series It’s My Life (2005-06), which consists of 366 paintings – each produced during a single day over the period of a year – hung more or less chronologically in the form of a single installation. In this particular work the artist brings together highly naturalistic representations of a diverse range of subjects including domestic interiors, music concerts and activities such as eating, lying in bed and playing the piano. Added to which are rather more subjective and even quasi-surrealistic images suggestive of the recollection of past events, dreams or reveries. The combined effect of all of this is not simply that of a record of quotidian experience, but instead of a temporally and spatially indeterminate narrative in which the boundary between the ordinary and the imagined world is rendered highly uncertain. Indeed, this blurring takes place to such a degree that the viewer soon relinquishes any attempt to construct an objective, sequentially ordered reading of events – of a sort suggested by the chosen format of It’s My Life – in favour of a far less directed response in which precision of meaning continually gives way to subjective feeling. To offer a definitive reading of It’s My Life is therefore impossible. The work actively points not only towards the fugitive nature of its maker’s interpretative engagement with the world, but also to our own. What is more, the aesthetic response which the work elicits from the viewer is not one that can be simply described according to conventional notions of beauty (or, for that matter, sublimity). Rather, as a number of commentators have indicated, it involves a subtly nuanced range of feelings in which any sense of pleasure (or pain) is always subject to qualification.[iv]

In conversation Song Kun seeks to reinforce the indeterminacy of her work in a number of ways. Tellingly, the artist refuses any notion that her work can be interpreted definitively from a single theoretical perspective. In particular, she is at pains to detach her work from any definitive involvement with current postmodernist/poststructuralist concerns relating to issues such as cultural identity, sexuality or gender, arguing instead that the rigid application of contemporary theory to her work tends to limit rather than open up its possible significance(s). In doing so she also points towards writings such as Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Joyce’s Ulysses as responses to the complexity of modern life that, through their stream of consciousness technique, go beyond the merely conceptual. Moreover, she draws attention to her respect for the writings of Jiddu Krishnamurti and in particular their espousing of the traditional Asian philosophical conception of enlightenment as freedom from the known. For the artist, the function of her work is not that of a quasi-theoretical/critical text. Instead it is, she argues, something of an al, exemplar of how life might be lived to the fullest in all its experienti cognitive and emotional richness.

Set against this background it is therefore possible to interpret Song Kun’s work and in particular it’s conceptually elusive character very much from a vernacular Chinese cultural point of view. Conventionally within the Chinese intellectual tradition there is no clearly defined category of thought relating to what is referred to in the West as aesthetics Instead, the production and reception of art are seen first and foremost as concrete actions that engender an uncertain relationship between subjects and objects. In traditional Chinese shan-shui painting, for example, this is something that can be understood to be achieved in formal terms by the use of visual cues that effectively blur the perceived boundary between the viewer and the viewed (most notably, non-geometric perspectives and the compositional flattening of forms). As a result of which, viewers are drawn into what might be described as an immersive bodily relationship with the work of art and that which it represents. From the point of view of the Western philosophical tradition entry into such a relationship – with its seemingly disorientating loss of any cognitive distance – might of course be viewed as a cue for the stabilising intervention of freely chosen human reason and, therefore, of feelings of pain-pleasure associated with the aesthetic category of the sublime. Within the Chinese intellectual tradition this is not at all the case. Instead, the work of art is considered to be an acting out of the fundamental (ineluctable) uncertainty of our interpretative relationship to the world as articulated through the ancient and historically influential Chinese conception of “tracklessness”; that is to say, the notion put forward in the Dao Dejing that our understanding of the world is always(/already) a subjective abstraction rather than a reflection of reality and that knowledge is something that emerges inconclusively over time as the result of unfolding, subjectively interpreted experience.[v] To engage with the world, as well as its surrogate the work of art, in these terms is thus to shuttle persistently and indeterminately between cognition and feeling without the intervention of reason.

To view Song Kun’s work in these highly aestheticized terms may of course be seen by some as a wholly solipsistic or narcissistic retreat from the pressing contradictions of material life in contemporary China. However, such judgements overlook the possibility of a more positive relationship between Song Kun’s work and the radical shifts in sensibility now taking place as a result of mainland China’s current social, economic and cultural transformation. In opening up space beyond the pervasive ideology of its revolutionary past, mainland China has arguably unleashed a range of socio-economic forces – such as entrepreneurialism and individualistic desire – that have not only enabled precipitous economic growth, but that have also raised the continuing spectre of social disharmony and alienation under capitalist modes of production. For the generation of Chinese artists who first came to prominence during the 1980s and 1990s this was seen, as previously indicated, very much as a target for critically deconstructive strategies which attempted – in some sense – to go beyond the historical impasse brought about by the opposition of capitalism and Marxism. In the case of China’s younger generation of artists, the material dialectics of social division and alienation remain a distinct threat. However, the ideological stand-off to which they were formerly tied is now – simply as matter of lived experience – much less in evidence. Consequently, when artists such as Song Kun actively eschew the terminology of postmodernist/poststructuralist theory they do so almost certainly because they have unconsciously assimilated its outcomes as a something of a norm. The world in which Song Kun and other members of the young generation of Chinese artists now live is arguably a profoundly deconstructed one in which – despite continuing attempts on the part of managerialist politicians of all political stripes to assert the possibility of progressive order – there is no longer any widespread belief in the sustainability of either categorical difference or the synthetic combination of opposites. What remains, however, is the need for strategies which allow individuals and groups to negotiate this profound state of uncertainty at a practical everyday level. The work of Song Kun is arguably indicative of such a strategy as seen from the point of view of a Chinese cultural habitus already predisposed to view conceptual uncertainty as something of a sine qua non and to look towards the productive (provisionally harmonizing) as well as the destabilising outcomes of that uncertainty as an abiding condition of human experience.

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Paul Gladston is a senior lecturer in cultural studies at the University of Nottingham. He is currently seconded to the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China as the head of the Division of International Communications Studies and the director of the Institute of Comparative Cultural Studies. His recent publications include Art History after Deconstruction (Magnolia 2005) and ‘Overcoming the Anxiety of Displacement: Song Tao and B6’s Yard’ in Hewitt and Geary (eds.) Diaspora(s) (CCCP Press, 2007). He is a regular contributor to Yishu, the journal of contemporary Chinese art.

[i] See, for example Martina Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avant-Garde 1979-1989, a Semiotic Analysis (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2003).
[ii] See Hou Hanru, Yu Hsiao (ed.) On the Mid Ground (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2002). Also see Huang Yongping, ‘Xiamen Dada – A Kind of Postmodernity?’ (‘Xiamen Dada – yizhong hou xiandai?’) in Zhonggou meishubao, no.46, 1986, 1.
[iii] See, for example, Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi (eds.), Fuck Off – Uncooperative Stance (Shanghai: Eastlink Gallery, 2000).
[iv] See, for example, David Spalding, ‘Song Kun: Universal Studios’, Artforum January 1st 2007.
[v] See Herbert Mainusch, ‘The Importance of Chinese Philosophy for Western Aesthetics’ in Mazhar Hussain and Robert Wilkinson (eds.), The Pursuit of Comparative Aesthetics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 141-142.

Work link

XIJIA.LETHE 2008

—David Spalding

2006

Beijing artist Song Kun’s It’s My Life (2005–2006) is an enormous installation of 365 small canvases, each representing a day in the artist’s year. Exhibited at Universal Studios—Beijing in the fall of 2006, the paintings were grouped more or less in chronological order, often in horizontal bands that stretched across the gallery’s walls; blank canvases were used to represent days of inactivity. Far more than an oil-on-canvas blog, It’s My Life offers viewers a series of elliptical narratives and moody moments rendered with a lush, sometimes despondent beauty.

A melancholic fog clouds many of Song’s paintings, making them feel like slightly out of focus snapshots in which the air hangs thick and heavy, weighed down by a sense of loss. Flashes of light reflect back at the viewer, cutting through the haze and sharply contouring surfaces such as skin, metal, and glass. It’s a technical trick that turns emotionally charged details into symbols in a vivid, fleeting, dream. One particularly poignant painting depicts a young couple riding their bicycles through a moonlit night, enveloped in a mist that renders the image part fading memory, part wistful fantasy. In a rare diptych, a man and a woman face one another in profile, sitting beside the windows of a train or airplane, illuminated by a mottled gray light. Such images capture the simultaneous desire and inability to say goodbye characterizing the artist’s overall relationship to the past, a weary nostalgia that shadows the entire installation.

Even in Song’s most simple works, everyday objects are transformed into portals that open onto the artist’s inner life. An oval wall clock with filigreed silver edges makes one acutely aware of time’s passage, provoking anticipation; the heel and toe of a leather boot, emblazoned with a swooping hawk, suggest a rebellious sense power. Elsewhere, a single event is explored over a series of days, revealing the artist’s gift for storytelling through her selection of details: an evening wedding unfolds in images such as the embroidered hem of a wedding gown, a floral arrangement of stargazer lilies and pink roses, and the dim interior of a hotel room.Throughout the year, Song experiments with a variety of approaches: we see nods to anime, Chinese landscape painting, and the still lives of Chardin, among others. And while Liu Xiaodong, the well-known painter and Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts professor, has certainly assisted in Song’s development.

A founding member of the N12 group—twelve ambitious young graduates of the Central Academy who have been organizing their own annual exhibitions—Song Kun was educated after the Cultural Revolution and raised in an era of accelerated urban and economic development. As a result, she and her compatriots are articulating new visual languages to express concerns that are less overtly political than those of their predecessors. Without lapsing into narcissism, It’s My Life gives viewers a very contemporary glimpse into the lives of Beijing’s youth, but ultimately Song’s finely crafted paintings invite us to meditate on the emotionally charged, fragmentary moments that constitute our own days.

Work Link

http://songkun.org/2018/01/22/it-is-my-life/