-
Hilary Binks
Art & Academic Advisor to International Art Fair Fine Art Asia
Xue Song is an exciting artist who creates eye-catching and thought-provoking paintings that demand a response from the viewer. He uses fire and ashes, which usually signify destruction and death, to symbolize the opposite: a vigorous rebirth of art and creativity. In his collages, Xue Song makes deliberate and specific references to Chinese history, society, politics and art, yet without explicit social comment or political didacticism. Like the trackers pulling boats on the River Yangtze, Xue Song carries the burden of Chinese tradition on his back and feels a duty to contribute to the continuation of Chinese art in the future. Yet he carries it lightly, for what he creates is new, vibrant and original. There is little doubt that with his piercing intellect and fertile imagination, Xue Song will continue to explore new directions for Chinese art in the 21st century.
2005. Xue Song: Take-off, Zee Stone Gallery
-
Per Hovdenakk
Norwegian Art Historian, Director of Henie Onstad Kunstsenter Museum
The artists of the 1990s are completely distinct. In their works, they blend Chinese traditional concepts and contemporary influences, and use a great variety of different materials to give expression to different meanings - from satirical social criticism to theoretical and rational painting. Xue Song is a vigorous representative of this new development and he has received much acclaim overseas. Xue Song received a rounded artistic education. A blaze almost reduced many years’ work entirely to cinders. This somewhat dramatic occurrence saw him abruptly move from working mainly with oils, propylene and Chinese painting materials, to the use of cinders to create his works.
Artistic works are centered on personal character and cultural identity, with the purpose of expressing how peoples’ traditional culture impacts, compresses and combines with the physical world. The rise of this artistic movement is of particular importance to the China of today.
This generation of Chinese artists has immense potential to allow modernism to influence China. Chinese artists also carry with them their own history, national tradition, mysterious culture and artistic character - the works created under the exertion of pressures fully reveal their infinite potential, startling the world.
It is only natural that Xue Song, representative of this kind of artist, should attract attention. Most important is that, in present-day China, Xue Song’s influence should only grow. -
Jiang Jun
Curator of the 60th Venice Biennale Chinese Pavilion
Xue Song's artistic works enable us to see a fragmented world composed of collages that are both holistic and multifaceted. The collages in Pop-style shapes and colors create multidimensional superimposition of images: modern urban landscapes, classical Western oil paintings, the natural landscapes of Song and Yuan Dynasties, old Shanghai calendars, socialist posters, contemporary fashion advertisements, classical Western music scores, calligraphic woks, folk embroidery, and wood-paneled New Year paintings, etc. They are both organically integrated and divided at the same time as if, telling stories utterly unrelated to each other, Importantly, each collage bears a burn mark on it, suggesting that all prior orders are to be abandoned so that the collages may “reborn" in ashes and scorch remains. -
Li Xu
Critic, Shanghai Biennale Curator
Each of Xue Song’s images contains parts made up of scores or even hundreds of fragments. Each fragment’s image is self-existent in space, while the information on each of the fragments is mutilated and incomplete, partially conforming to the whole yet at the same time turning the whole on its head. The information not only builds the image, but also deconstructs it at the same time.
The burning has made these small fragments of paper independent from each other yet interconnected into a network. These drab pieces of scrap paper have been transformed by Xue Song’s touch, into something of unexpected gusto leading us to an unexpected outcome.
The terminator of printed matter, Xue Song employs all manner of paper, burning and piecing it together to exhibit a myriad of visual effects. To those book collectors in publishing houses, Xue Song is no doubt an extremely ruthless “killer”, but looking from a different angle Xue Song’s studio (notwithstanding the cemetery of all that printed matter) is also a place where paper may be reborn.
-
Elaine Suyu Liu
Director of Loftyart Gallery, Art Critic and Curator
In his work, Xue Song combs through the annals of art history, selecting the images that speak to him most. Paired in juxtaposition or parody, images of traditional Chinese art appear next to their Western counterparts in a bizarre and yet visually striking style. In addition to collage clippings, the traditional Chinese aesthetic is often expanded onto the overall composition. Whether capturing the abstract qualities of cursive calligraphy, or visualizing the poetic elements of a traditional landscape, Xue Song's compositions cast a new light on the time-honored tradition of link and wash. While it captures the spirit of the traditional aesthetic, it is not constrained by the medium itself. Modern in practice and appearance, it also possesses a sense of familiarity. Ultimately, his art carries a taste of the orient to the Western eye and a feeling of nostalgia for all Modern viewers.
-
Lu Peng
Art Historian, Director of Chengdu Contemporary Art Museum, China
The images and works with Chinese characters created by Xue Song, using burnt fragments of printed matter, possess a singularity among pop art. Unlike other artists, using burnt fragments of printed matter was not the result of deep reflection, but rather was born in 1991 from the aftermath of a devastating fire. Later, artists used burnt fragments of printed matter to make collages and produce ranges of works such as the “plum orchid bamboo chrysanthemum”. The fragments the artists used came from printed matter relating to “plum orchid bamboo chrysanthemum”.While touching on sociological themes of the contemporary era, Xue Song again sought printed matter fragments related to the content. In this way, by observing Xue Song’s works you cannot merely confine yourself to their composition and ensemble, but you must also pay attention to the details in the fragments. This linguistic expression possesses an irreplaceable character, in both execution and effect. As artists pay more attention to social reality, the conceptual, conscious use of “burning” to create a metaphor for “negation” and “criticism” appears to take an extraordinary attitude. From the disparagement and negation of traditional calligraphy to the expression of doubt over international politics, artists have all adopted this unique stand. For each work’s execution, the artist purchases different types of printed matter from the bookstore, taking symbols that have already become part of history and using them as material to form a new image of history; using extrinsic culture and historical symbols as his own source of artistic imagery. Such painstaking execution makes his works appear to possess a wealth of technical image resources. However, in these times of an inundation of the profane and the complete commercialization of pop art, Xue Song persists in his own artistic seriousness and retains a stable personal style and solemn artistic inclination. -
Ma Qinzhong
Researcher at the Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, East China Normal University
Xue Song’s works possess a comprehensive generality in a networked commercial age; national contradictions and cultural blending have never been so frequent and lasting, they are occurring every day and every hour. In particular, his linguistic performance and science-oriented interrelationships give people food for thought. The popular images of burned books have both the meaning of death and regeneration, but also directly cut into a socio-cultural focal spot, taking views on international issues and transforming them into objects of routine reflection. -
Daryl Joseph Moore
Founding Dean of the College of the Arts at California State University, Stanislaus, USA
Experiencing Xue Songs’ thought-provoking work for the first time in 1999, I was immediately struck by the humanity of his images. He spoke of dialogues and the broad shoulders of giants in the arts that went before him, individuals whose work provided a visual sounding board for the new palette that he so deftly employs in his picture making process when I experienced his work for the first time. In that moment, I had indeed moved away from formal constructs of familiarity, gazing through the door of Xue Songs’ new way of seeing and composing. He gives us a visual path without showing us the exact route, allowing for the essential element of discovery present in most things original. The social and political commentary on his canvases seem benign in a time when many contemporary artists in both the east and the west serve up gluttonous amounts of beauty, horror and tragedies in day-to-day society, often in grotesque and in-your-face forms of visual expression, leaving little room for reflection and discovery — only shock. Xue Song provides us with a familiar imagery that encourages reflection through the use of the medium — the seemingly faceless and soulless figures built from the torn remnants of another life, provide us a mirror, as if looking into an ocean — filled with the multiple surfaces of his intricate layers of image, word and landscape. He has managed to inculcate traditional Chinese landscape painting, the use of calligraphy and collage, transcending both eastern and western modalities. -
Pi Daojian
Curator, Artistic Director of the First Guangzhou Biennale
Xue Song’s new artistic creation style is regarded as localistic response to the global Pop art movement in light of his use of popular images along with the technique of collage; In fact, the rich Chinese cultural flavor of Xue Song’s creation is the contribution and promotion of Chinese contemporary art to the international trend of Pop art. What matters is the cultural-sociological significance or sociological-cultural significance of Xue Song’s creation. His all-encompassing image production is the symbol and memory of the “rebirth” of the national culture of an era. -
Toshio Shimizu
Professor at Gakushuin Women's College, Japan
At a glance, the art arena of contemporary China seems to be still in a primeval state. However, after an in-depth observation, it would be discovered that art creation responds closely to social changes. In the history of Chinese contemporary art, Xue Song plays the role of liberalizing symbolic pictures from the past memories, by which the era strides out a step forward. -
Wang Nanming
Writer, Independent Curator and Critic
“My works are born of fire.” When Xue Song talks about his works like this, he is essentially summing up the character of contemporary art. Our traditional wash painting, canvas and sculptural arts all needed to be created from fixed materials, whereas contemporary art has broken free of such predetermined means. With the theme of “Anything can become art”, artists set out from a personal perspective, utilizing all manner of media and materials to realize their creative processes. In Xue Song’s creations, portraiture is suddenly transformed into some kind of moulage, pushing our clear memories toward a blur. Images from present-day life and people’s deportment and social information are made complicated and confusing amongst the repeating collage of materials, leaving our rigid traditional judgements with nothing to go on.
-
Wang Shaoqiang
Director of Guangdong Museum of Art, Council Member of China Artists Association
Since the 1980s, in the process of China's modernization, Eastern and Western art and culture have undergone exchange, collision and integration. A group of Chinese avant garde artists who dared to explore new grounds ventured to study Western culture and the historical framework of Western art with the aim of re-exploring and discovering the value of Chinese traditional acsthetics and culture. By means of this they sought to establish and promote the development of Chinese culture and art in the international cultural community. Xue Song is an important force in this movement. -
Zhu Qi
Art Critic and Independent Curator
As a member of the 60s generation, Xue Song possesses the fundamental cultural characteristics of this generation: a measured humor, constructiveness and profound political memory, a rationalization in the appraisal of historical politics, and introspection. The images Xue Song uses are firstly a kind of political material that is subsequently transformed into a kind of bop, but it is difficult to say that it has become a kind of political bop. They possess a sort of recent mystery, but will always remain planiform and perceptual. They are mysterious, obscure and poetic and will not be waved away.
The burning of printed matter has affixed a sense of history to the pure images - this sensation truly belongs to the 90s. Xue Song’s burning is not a deliberate venting of feelings or criticism. On the contrary, those scraps of paper stacked upon each other reflect with great interest Xue Song’s complicated personal reaction to books. The image of books made up of thickly dotted lines seems to form Xue Song’s unreachable and mysterious world. Books are a constant theme, code, barrier, maze or authority. From their external appearance and supporting medium, they seem like an egotistical inner world, well known and played at will by the author, but in their interior linguistic world they seem rather like an unapproachable outer world.
The personal historical expression of people of the 60s generation has been a drawn-out process in China. The 60s generation needs time to clear their memories, to remould themselves, to recognize the new era and to study and reconstruct a new individuality. They have just completed the self-remolding from the conceptual Utopian era, and now must adapt themselves to meet the economic Utopia. They possess the clarity and reason of bystanders and also have the faith and spiritual advocacy of a great era in history, but they lack their own form and vehicle of expression. Xue Song has discovered a way via traditional painting and calligraphy.
-
The critics appear in alphabetical order (A-Z) according to surname.