Xue Song: The Mountain Echoes

ShanghART Singapore presents one of the pioneer “Pop Art” artists in China – Xue Song’s solo exhibition, titled The Mountain Echoes. The exhibition will showcase his widely known collage of landscapes and poetry.

Due to his unique artistic language and style, which he uses not only printed images and texts but also soot and ashes to create his work in the early 1990s, he became one of the most influential and representative artists of Chinese Contemporary Art. In his artwork, each fragment expresses the complex aspects of the Chinese history and culture.

In Chinese traditional culture, landscape imagery is often the main theme of artistic creation. Landscape paintings focuses on expressing the ‘senses of nature’, with a poetic and picturesque outcome. Guo Xi, a literatus and well-known landscape painter from the Northern Song Dynasty once said: “Poetry is like an invisible painting, while a painting is a tactile poetry.” When landscape imagery is placed in a contemporary context, a new interpretation full of spirituality, sensitivity and temporal nature is composed. In some of Xue Song’s artwork, the urban life of luxury and pleasure is placed in contrast with the traditional landscape imagery on the same canvas, this forms a poetic variation and creates a strong dialogue between the past and present.

When one opens the door, mountains are all he see, while the mountain remains exactly from a long time ago, but the echo resounding from in between the valleys are those of today and yesterday: “Unsolicited reply/ To a babbling wanderer sent/ Like her ordinary cry/ Like—but oh, how different!” (Quoted from The Mountain Echo, William Wordsworth)