Hanart TZ Gallery

Previous Exhibition

Song Yongping 2007
宋永平 2007

Song Yongping 宋永平
22nd Nov - 8th Dec, 2007
Hanart T Z Gallery, Hong Kong

Hatred of Perfection: Song Yongping’s Artistic Journey

Gao Minglu

One of the seminal artists of China’s ’85 Art Movement, Song Yongping graduated from the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 1983 and returned to his native Shanxi province soon thereafter. Song has spent most of the last two decades creating compelling contemporary art from his hometown base of Taiyuan. In 1985 Song and a group of like-minded artists organised the Shanxi Contemporary Art exhibition in Taiyuan, encompassing works ranging from paintings and sculpture to installations made with found objects. The exhibition took place during the same period that the National Gallery in Beijing was mounting the unprecedented show of works by the American Pop artist Robert Raucshenberg, and in many ways the Shanxi exhibition was a response to Rauschenberg’s art. Yet, although Song and other artists were clearly influenced by Rauschenberg’s Pop art, for example in their incorporation of found objects into some of their creations, overall their works exuded a kind of expressionistic spirit that went beyond a mere imitation of the American Pop aesthetic.

Rather than the industrial, mass-produced sensibilities of American Pop art, the works of the Shanxi artists evinced, in both choice of materials and expressive impact, a kind of raw vitality that reflected the primitive “yellow earthiness” of life in the high plateaus. A similar kind of raw, rustic quality characterised the work of other young artists centred in remote provincial areas, such as Mao Xuhui and Yang Shufeng in Kunming, Yunnan province and Cao Yong in Yangzhou, Gansu province. These artists transmuted the ‘vitality’ of American Pop art materials into the more primitive “vitality” of the earthy materials of the Northwest. This kind of vitality not only emphasised the basic nature of the material, but also stressed its spiritual and generative power. Their transmutation of the Pop aesthetic into a more localised sensibility is an apt demonstration of the “displacement” occurring when Western modern art forms were “imported” into China. In this case, the industrialised, materialistic and repetitive nature of Pop art was transformed into a rustic, emotional expressiveness. Thus, even while it is indisputable that American Pop art had a major impact on Chinese avant-garde art of the 1980s, Chinese artists will never produce a truly Pop art.

Be that as it may, an intriguing question is why American Pop art as a form was first embraced by artists of China’s northwest, rather than by artists living in the coastal cities, or in the more central areas of Zhejiang, Jiangsu and northeast China? For example, artists such as Huang Yongping and Wu Shanzhuan, both of whom graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, did not begin using found materials to produce conceptual art until after 1986. (It should also be noted that as conceptual art, their work is more directly related to American Pop and its language more essentially “westernised” than the “Pop” art produced by artists such as Song Yongping.)

But shifting our attention from the broader topic of Pop art in China to Pop art’s specific relation to the work of Song Yongping, we find that an engagement with Pop art has been part of his artistic journey over for the past two decades. Yet, while during these years Song created a number of artworks in a wide range of media closely related to Pop methodologies, including performance art, installation, “rustic art” happenings, action art and photography, he also has created oil paintings whose painterly, “hand-worked” quality sets them completely apart from the Pop aesthetic. Yet a review of Song’s oeuvre reveals that a consistent internal logic underpins all of his creative work. This internal logic can be characterised by the parallel concepts of “incompleteness” and “destructiveness”.

“Incompleteness” here does not refer to an incompleteness of form or of composition, but rather to the idea that within every stage of his stylistic development, even while he has created artworks with a common theme, when taken together these works never gel into the completeness of a “series”. To the contrary, in any particular period his creative work is imbued with a quality of randomness: works randomly appear, and then they randomly stop appearing. There seems to be no planned, conscious intention or development.

We may take the case of Song’s concept of “rustic art” happenings as an example. The first event of this type took place in 1986, shortly after the 1995 Shanxi Contemporary Art Exhibition. Song and a group of artist friends created a large assemblage of ceramic objects inspired by the folk and religious traditions of the Northwest. The artists then brought these objects to local villages and staged exhibitions for the village inhabitants. This action became the first in a series of events that the Shanxi group of artists had planned under the heading of the “Rural Village Art Movement” and which was to be documented on film in conjunction with the “New Art Trends Production Team” of the China Central Broadcasting Company. In Song Yongping’s original plan, the group was also supposed to stage an action in which they would participate in the slaughter of pigs in a local farming village. However, the film production team vetoed this plan as being too bloody, and it was never carried out. If indeed the action had taken place, it would have constituted the earliest instance of a Chinese artist using a live animal in performance art, and also would have predated Zhu Yu’s performance art work in which he slaughtered a pig by at least a decade. More importantly, Song Yongping’s concept had a much stronger contextual quality: the pig slaughter would have been carried out in rural village setting, in the midst of village life, and would have been marked by a archetypal sense of ceremony and of place.

As it turned out, Song Yongping did not consider performance art as a professional pursuit nor did he continue to develop his initial ideas for performance art works. Yet later, I saw a triptych of oil paintings by Song at a contemporary art exhibition in which he had created a sense of wild abstraction by slashing across the canvases with a huge brush.
It wasn’t until 1993 that Song created a second “rural art action” which involved traveling along the borders of the Yellow River and painting from life the scenes encountered there. This action was in fact a response to the economic boom of the early 1990s and the impact of the art market on the idealism of ‘80s avant-garde art. As an act of opposition and reflection, Song’s “rural art action” was in a sense also related to the earlier “rustic art” movement of the 1980s, with the difference being that his target was the phenomena of increasing globalisation and the “ideology of modernisation” sweeping the country. It was also, by extension, an act of defiance and destruction against the prevailing art ideology. Song’s overall sense of destructiveness is constructed through a vocabulary of terms such as bloody, violent, primitive, northwest, earthy. The essence of this type of destructiveness is an indifference to the outcome, and this is reflected in the way he employs a methodology of random or irregular acts of destructiveness. This holds true even though his earliest “destructive” works contained within them a very strong sense of constructive experience. An example is his early performance work Experience of a Vision, 1986, which he performed together with his brother Song Yonghong, and which sought to duplicate a primitive environment and the physical experience of living within such an environment. This work can be described as still having within it some element of idealism, some concern with effect, in the same way that the early Pop art of the 1985 Shanxi Contemporary Art Exhibition sought to express a cultural soul and to demonstrate a reverence for the primitive nature of the materials. However, beginning in 1987 we see a more conscious and deliberate destructiveness emerging in Song’s art.

In the period immediately following the events of June 4th, 1989, Song Yongping created his ‘bicycle’ series of action art and installations in Taiyuan. For this work Song used a bulldozer to crush a group of bicycles, which he then spray-painted and assembled into a “sculpture’ which was installed at the main entrance to the Taiyuan Steel Factory. Although Song’s action was informed in part by the processes used by the steel mill to crush scrap metal, when I first saw the photo documentation of this series I immediately thought of the Tian’an men Incident, when so many bicycles were crushed by army tanks. In my mind I travelled back in time too the early hours of June 4th, when I had placed my own bicycle at the entranceway to the main hall at Tian’an men. Even though neither I nor my bicycle were crushed by tanks that day, we both were trampled by the huge number of people fleeing from the tanks and both of us ended up bruised and battered. I do not know if Song Yongping was thinking of June 4th when he created this work, but the material violence of its language very readily brings to mind associations with such specific acts of violence. At particular moment in time, the crushed bicycles clearly took on a symbolism referential to something that had been subjected to violence and torture.
Song Yongping’s paintings also express a similarly conscious awareness of violence. This awareness is expressed from two different angles: through the choice of subject matter and through his conceptual thinking. Previously I have characterised the paintings produced during the early 1990s by a group of artists led by Song Yongping, Su Xinping, and Cao Yong as “Pictures of the New Floating World”. On the surface, their paintings of this period appear to share similar qualities with works of the new generation of Cynical Realist painters who emerged in the early ‘90s such Liu Xiaodong and Fang Lijun, but in fact there are critical differences in the nature of the subject matter. The “Cynical Realist” painters generally created satirical self-portraits or facetious “snapshots” of their friends and family members. But Song Yongping, Su Xinping and Cao Yong—all of whom were part of the ‘85 art movement, generally chose to portray people belonging to the lower strata of urban society or to satirize the yearning and desire of materialistic urban culture. Thus “New Floating World” painting can be defined as critical painting, rather than as cynical painting. The violence inherent in Song Yongping’s paintings is a critique of the violence that stems from desire and power.

In 2000, Song Yongping painted a group of landscapes that clearly referenced an old-fashioned/outmoded painting tradition. Perhaps because he felt the paintings did not look old-fashioned enough, Song punched holes in the canvases—an eloquent expression of the destructive nature of human behaviour. These works made me think of the Cultural Revolution campaign to “destroy the Four Olds” (old culture, old thoughts, old customs, and old habits).

This kind of destructive power often is a reaction to outside stimuli. And Song Yongping’s creative work seems inextricably linked to the stimuli of being alive. Yet when it comes to mundane, everyday existence, true stimulation is always in short supply. Thus, the only recourse for the artist was to attempt to transform the mundane elements of daily life into the stimulus for his art; yet even as this process brought him a temporary sense of excitement, it also carried with it a strong element of pain. In the late 1990s Song began to create a series of photographs depicting his parents, both of whom suffered from debilitating illness. The banality and receptiveness of their daily lives wore down Song Yongping’s fiery nature and tamed it into one of patience and endurance. Day after day he attended to his parents’ needs; unable to pursue other activities, he began to photograph his parents, their lives and bodies ravaged by illness. The subject matter often appears as absurd. Yet, there is no irony or facetiousness in these works, only a kind of heavy, grotesque tragedy. The reality and history of song Yongping’s own life, of his family and of his country can be read in the scarred map of his parents’ bodies.

At the heart of Song Yongping’s concept of art is a rejection of the idea of pursuing the perfection of a material or physical form. One could even go so far as to say that Song hates perfection. He himself has stated that at times he intentionally has distorted the imagery in his painting, making it look clumsy and amateurish, as though it had been painted by someone who didn’t know how to paint. This approach can be seen in his recent group of “historical paintings” depicting figures such as Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Here the compositions are very loose, with the casual quality of collage: it appears as though fragmented images of different events were randomly jammed together onto the canvas. Brushwork and palette are both rough and unrefined, and the figures convey an impression of agitation, of having been impulsively and messily painted. These qualities are reflective not only of Song’s artistic consciousness, but also are the by-product of his unconscious emotional state.

From many standpoints, Song Yongping is a very unusual artist. For over twenty years he made the conscious choice to live and work in Shanxi and bear the burden of caring for his parents. It is only relatively recently, after the death of his parents, that he left Shanxi and moved to Beijing. Song’s long-term commitment to Shanxi echoes the commitments of Mao Xuhui to Kunming and Dai Guangyu to Chengdu. As far as the of contemporary Chinese art goes, it will fade away with the years and demonstrate even more its preciousness. will fade with the years and even more demonstrate its preciousness? Song Yongping’s journey has not been a purely artistic one. He has always remained attentive to the suffering and hardship of society and its people, just as he remained a devoted and caring son to his invalid parents—regardless of the sacrifice this may have meant in terms of his own creative work and artistic output. One can only imagine the loneliness he suffered, living off the beaten track in Taiyuan, committed to the creation of “avant-garde” art in a place where there was almost no one to understand it. But the violence and bloodiness of Song’s art is not reflective of the patience, perseverance and tenderness with which he has lived his life: unwilling to abandon human compassion or to turn his back on the needs of his family, attending resolutely to the most wearingly mundane and trivial matters of daily existence. He is truly a man with a compassionate heart. The trajectory of Song’s life can be described as unique among those key artists who emerged from the ’85 movement. He has never wavered in his commitment to his art, yet at the same time he has continuously questioned both himself and the world, he has grappled with fate and agitated against destiny. Seen through Song Yongping’s eyes, the world appears as dark and tragic. But this is not because he lacks the capacity to imagine Utopia: rather, it is simply because reality is just not very pretty.

(Translated by Valerie C. Doran)