Xue Song 薛 松 b. 1965

Xue Song's artistic career began in 1988. Abandoning traditional realism, his early works were predominantly expressionist and abstract in style. Visiting his studio after its destruction by fire in 1990, Xue Song saw ashes scattered throughout the ruins. It inspired a new creative method that mixed ashes with paint and collaged images to form a wholly new visual style. The works of this period were still largely abstract in nature.

 

Xue Song keenly grasped the significance of China's opening to the outside world and the rise of its metropolises in the late 1990s. Influenced by globalism and consumerist culture, he introduced Pop Art techniques and collaged incinerated printed scraps to create his images. His technical contributions to the technique of collage have enriched and developed the visual lexicon of Pop Art. The readymade images and texts appropriated by Xue Song cover a wide range of important contemporary social themes, objects and topics, presenting a cultural and humanist form of Pop Art that has received widespread acclaim.

 

Landscapes are an enduring element of traditional Chinese art. Xue Song transformed landscapes into a formal framework, utilising Pop visual language to address different subjects such as Western art history, Chinese calligraphy, urban landscapes, and contemporary popular imagery. The contours of the landscape are delineated by diverse collaged elements, which unite to portray a multi-dimensional reality that is both global and local, an implicit reflection of the "glocalisation" of Chinese urban culture today, namely the globalisation of the local and the localisation of the global. These two forces act both in opposition to and in harmony with each other.

 

The interdependence of China and the West is a sensitive and controversial topic in the story of China's modernisation. Xue Song uses a mix of collage and montage techniques to reflect on the relationship between the two powers in this series. The series presents the duality of the contemporary Chinese spiritual world, the symbiotic relationship between Chinese and Western cultural ideas, as well as the connections between the traditional and the contemporary, and the elites and the masses.

 

The "Text and Calligraphy" series not only revisits Xue Song's early text collage works, but also signals his long-term fascination with the integration of Chinese and Western cultures, and marks his return to abstraction. The mutual referencing and transformation of abstraction and calligraphy particularly fascinates the artist.

 

Xue Song's "Metropolis" series focuses on the replacement of old and new urban landscapes, and observes people's joy, confusion, dreams and losses amidst drastic changes engendered by China's rapid urbanisation at the end of the 20th century. These works also echo the way European artists collaged urban imagery in the 1920s.

 

"The Dao from Nature" can be understood as Xue Song's return to the abstraction and expressionism of his earlier works. Born in Dangshan, Xue Song experienced a childhood in close proximity to nature, and was also influenced by the Daoist philosophy of Zhuangzi. After experiencing urban prosperity and the culture of consumerism referenced by Pop Art, this series represents the artist's return to nature and re-integration of organic elements with Pop Art.