Song Kun: Infinity

Artist : Song Kun

Curator : Yang Jian

Exhibition Dates : 2024.3.23- 2024.5.26

Venue : Song Art Museum

Address : Grasse Road, Shunyi District, Beijing

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.

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.

Text (excerpt)/Yang Jian