Inverse space-time
190×130cm
Oil on canvas
2014-2017
In the second half of November 2017, the cover of the second half of the monthly magazine "Collection Investment Guide" published a part of Zhou Song's work "Against Time and Space", which received high praise when exhibited at the Florence Biennale. "Collection Investment Guide" is the only art collection investment publication under Xinhua News Agency and authoritative financial media.
As early as 2014, the 32-year-old Zhou Song was selected as the 90th in the Hurun list with a total transaction price of 12.81 million yuan, which was the first time that an "80" artist was listed in the Hurun art list. Now, in Zhou Song's new series of works based on interdisciplinary research in art, science, philosophy and so on, the oil painting "Reverse Time and Space" stands out with its novel themes and the philosophical thinking contained in it, which not only received high praise from local audiences and experts and scholars when it was exhibited at the 2017 Florence Biennale, but also selected as a cover for publication in the latest issue of the "Collection Investment Guide".
Carlo Francini, head of the UNESCO Office of the City of Florence, art historian and recipient of the Order of the Merits of the Italian Republic, commented on the exhibition in Florence: "Zhou Song's surrealist work Against Time and Space not only uses his exquisite painting techniques, but also uses the imaginative contemporary network to control the dramatic effect of alienation, which left me with a strong sense of impact. If you look closely, you can find fragments of some robots and the scenes that have fought with it, which is completely different from European tradition. The girl in the black tights, armed with a knife and fork, is like a heroine in the Matrix, and is presented to us as a static, victorious figure after a battle with the robot, surrounded by metal fragments, pictures and strawberries of the robot, which is very attractive. ”
In April 2019, the cover of "Cultural Exchange" published a part of Zhou Song's work "Against Time and Space". Founded in 1987, this journal is sponsored by the Zhejiang Provincial Association for Foreign Cultural Exchanges and the Zhejiang Provincial People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries.
In October 2021, Al-Tiba9, a well-known international contemporary art magazine in Spain, published Zhou Song's "Against Time and Space" on the back cover.
Imitation and Imitation
Mimicry and simulacra
Stacy Worcester
Stacey Vorster
Art historian, writer, curator
Art Historian, Author, Curator
University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
University of the Wat Wilhaën, South Africa
University of Amsterdam
University of the Witwatersrand
Other examples involving citations appear in Zhou Song's work. For example, in "Against Time and Space" (2014-2017), the main figure is a slender, beautiful black-haired woman, wearing a black tights suit and black high heels, which is made of latex or leather. The woman is clearly referenced by the digital punk heroines of cartoons and films, such as Suko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell (first serialized in 1989 as a youth comic book series and recently launched in the Hollywood blockbuster of the same name), Molly Millians in William Gibson's Manson Trilogy (1984–1988), Rachel in Blade Runner (1982) and Trinity in The Matrix (1999).
Zhou Song, "Inverse Time and Space", Part 2014-2017
As a title, "Against Time and Space" reminds people to think about how these images reflect the past in various ways while carrying the future. In fact, in many of Zhou Song's works, time is an obvious theme. In this painting, the timeline is now exploding on wires, objects, photographs and mechanical parts, but the woman in the painting still stands there steadily, unaffected by the chaos around her. Photo material acts as a wide variety of archives that give us a glimpse into important moments in history. Floating in the upper left corner of the frame is a shattered and curled photograph faithfully recreating the 1969 lunar landing by astronaut Buzz Aldrin, taken by Neil Armstrong. Another photograph shows a mushroom cloud, and Mr. Zhou is based on a picture of Operation Dominica, the largest U.S. nuclear weapons test near Christmas Island in the Pacific in 1962. Female figures, along with damaged images, seem to be able to resolve the tensions implicit in most science fiction works.
In contrast to the photographs reflecting historical and scientific achievements, Zhou Song directly refers to two works of art. One of them is Michelangelo's famous fresco The Creation of Adam, which was painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in 1508-1512. The iconic image in the fresco is of God reaching out to touch Adam's hand, thus giving him life, in line with the Jewish Christian account of the origin of life on Earth. It contains many levels of meaning. In a sense, "Inverse Time and Space" uses apocalyptic tone to freeze the picture in an archival, clear and true sense of the origin of life on Earth. In another sense, it clearly references the creation of electronic humans, robots, artificial intelligence, and social robots; human behavior imitates its own creations. On the other hand, however, he cites the profound postmodernity of Michelangelo's work, acknowledging the immortality of this famous painting while also rejecting it in the form of a tiny, imperceptible replica.
Fascinatingly, another piece of fine art involved in the painting comes from one of America's most recognized and wealthy artists, Jeff Koons. To the left of Michelangelo's work is a mirror-polished metal balloon dog, one of the most iconic works of contemporary late capitalist art, into which Jeff has devoted a great deal of effort. Most of these sculptures are made of sturdy sheets of metal on a grand scale, highlighting the fragility of the balloon products while also expressing their sheer size and solidity. In Zhou Song's work, he directly breaks the nose of the balloon animal, which shows both its materiality and its fragility. As far as the whole work is concerned, the balloon dog blends with the aesthetics of the rest of the work, and also highlights the proliferation of robotic pets on the market. Here the author again expresses the shift in time, and the references to other works of art seem to symbolize the complexity of consumerism in the field of art and technology. The social robot is also shown in the work through a picture of a female bionic person, including a mutilated robot arm, as well as a broken robot head and shoulders, whose body has extended out of the picture frame. The female figure seems to have overcome and eventually replaced the previous model.
Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog, 1994-2000
Perhaps the most unusual part of the painting is the series of strawberries that erupt throughout the scene. Against the backdrop of essentially grayscale graphs, these bright red fruits suddenly appear in front of the audience in a surprising way. Zhou Song likened strawberries to hearts, and in 2011 conducted a series of large-scale detailed studies of the fruit. In addition to shape and color, strawberries have also always been associated with love and romance, and as Walter Gibson put it, they are the fruits of Venus. Gibson, in his essay The Strawberry of Hironimus Bosch, details how medieval and Renaissance artworks used strawberries and used them as complex symbols on all levels. His analysis is based on Bosch's famous Earthly Paradise (c.1500), in which strawberries appear in the middle of the painting in various sizes. Given the conflicting analysis of the work, Gibson notes that Strawberry helped paint the famous painting as a scene between the Garden of Eden and Hell. He also makes special mention of Laurenda Dick's discussion of the use of strawberries in medieval medicine, which they suggested in the early days as an "alchemical allegory of death and resurrection." Combined with Zhou Song's idea of strawberries as hearts, the painting clearly embodies a kind of bionetics: as an obvious organic object, it ripens rapidly and decays more rapidly, and the strawberry symbolizes the fragility of the mechanical elements in the center of the main figure of the picture. In stark contrast to the rest of the metal parts that make up the background, the strawberry also symbolizes opposition to the technological future utopia represented by inorganic elements. The vividness of the strawberry is closely connected to the central character, who is the only part of the picture that has color besides the strawberry.
Ronimus Bosch, Paradise on Earth c.1500
Part c.1500 of Paradise on Earth
The ultimate challenge in appreciating this painting is to think about whether the protagonist is indeed human. The life-size and photorealistic details of the work make a connection between this female figure and the audience. Her image is by no means idealistic: freckles on her cheeks, her hair split and her style is casual. This work is more than just an oil painting, it is more like a gateway to the future world, perhaps taking the viewer on a time trip. However, there are still some tension elements in the work, which make the whole appreciation process slightly uneasy. Her references to digital punk and sci-fi films often come with a narrative archetype in which characters struggle to explore whether their identities are humans or robots, but the result of this struggle is often failure rather than an answer. For example, in Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi film Blade Runner, Rachel is a replicant whose program is implanted with memories to consider herself human. As she begins to realize the truth of the matter, the film's protagonist, Rick Deckard, falls in love with her, and thus raises questions about her ability to cross the line between humans and robots.
The film's story is set in Los Angeles, but many of the scenes are permeated with Asian elements. As David M. S. Rowe, Bethy Huang and Greta M. As Niu argues in "Techno Orientalism: Imagining Asia from Speculative Fiction, History, and Media," this is extremely common in science fiction films. The authors point out that introducing race into the futuristic world of science fiction would complicate the forms of knowledge between humans and non-humans. They wrote a series of papers on the relationship between Asia and technology, and defined the term "technological Orientalism" as "the phenomenon of imagining asians and Asians engaging in cultural production and political speech in the form of low or high technology." Throughout the history of Asians' appearances in popular science fiction films, authors have often presented robots and social robots as Asians, creating a series of stereotypes that reflect their hostility to Asians and ultimately lead to the loss of humanity in the context of World War II. Luo et al. argue that technological Orientalism "sees Asians as mere analogues and carries a general sense of inhumanity towards Asian labor."
The Asian female figure in Inverse Timetime, although it does not embody non-human or bionetic feelings, her relationship with reality is complex. She presents herself to the audience in ultra-realistic details, at the same size as a real person. But she was confined to the two-dimensional surface of the canvas and presented in the form of an Asian, which coincided with the (problematic) state of technological Orientalism in which Asians were used as simulants.
The tension between East and West recurs in the work, further emphasizing their complex collisions with the characters. For example, a character holds a pair of knives and forks in both hands. While on the surface this is a red flag, it also embodies the difference between East and West. The knife and fork as a metal tool is also equivalent to other shiny technological products in the work, and expresses a sense of progress in Western tools. Archival photographs in oil paintings play a similar role. For example, the moon landing was placed in the context of the global space race and the United States became the epicenter of Western discourse by making the United States a leader in technological progress and human development. Interestingly, in the photo zhou song drew, a small coat of arms of the American flag on Aldrin's shoulder was missing. Similarly, photographs of nuclear tests are linked to the violence of nuclear war caused by the West against the East, most notably the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, late in World War II.
Each element in the painting challenges the dynamic and complex relationship between humans and robots, survival and death, East and West, and progress and destruction. This is a complex embodiment of political identity in Zhou Song's work. The formulation of imitation and imitation allows the work of art to transcend simple identification. By challenging and complicating reality, these images call into question alternatives, themselves, and the ability to imitate. By using non-human examples as well as metaphors of substitutes, Zhou Song's focus has moved beyond humans and robots to issues of self and others as well as racial issues, all of which are expressed in various forms such as image reinforcement or destruction.
注：此文节选自论文 RECOGNITION, ENCOUNTER, AND VISION, IN THE WORK OF ZHOU SONG by Stacey Vorster
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Zhou Song | Zhousong
Born in 1982 in Jiangxi. Graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 2006, he is one of the most representative post-80s painters in China, and now lives and works in Beijing.
In recent years, he has been active in the international exhibition stage, and his works have been exhibited in important institutions at home and abroad, such as Sotheby's in Los Angeles, the Grand Palais de France, the Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona, Spain, the Toronto Art Center in Canada, the D'Basso Castle in Florence, Italy, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bonn, Germany, the YBL Creative Art Center in Budapest, Hungary, the Shacht Palace in Santiago de Chile, the Yingga Garcelasso Cultural Center in Peru, the National Art Museum of China, the Today Art Museum and other important institutions at home and abroad, and won important art awards.
In 2006, he won the first prize of graduation creation of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts and the bronze medal of the National Fine Arts Academy Nomination Exhibition, and his works were collected by Today Art Museum; in 2007, he participated in the "First Documenta Today Exhibition";
In 2009, he held the "Zhou Song Solo Works Exhibition" at Today Art Museum;
In 2011, he participated in the "Fifth Chengdu Biennale";
In 2012, he won the "Painting Award" of the 5th May Fourth International Youth Art Festival;
In 2016, he participated in the "Grand Palais de France Art Salon Exhibition";
In 2017, he participated in the 11th Florence International Biennale and won the "Lorenzo International Installation Art Award", and in the same year, he won the "Most Collectible Artist Award" of the 2nd Art Market Value Construction Award;
In 2018, he was invited to participate in the "3rd International Biennial Robot Philosophy Conference" held by the University of Vienna, and was interviewed by the Program of "Talking about the Art World" of the Chinese Art Laboratory of Harvard University in the United States, and won the "Surrealism Honor Award" at the 13th ARC International Art Salon Exhibition;
2019 Participated in the "13th Havana Biennale, Cuba".
In 2014, it was listed on the Hurun Art List with a total auction turnover of 12.81 million yuan, setting a new age record for the youngest artist on the list; his works have been collected by art institutions and individuals at home and abroad, such as the Rothschild family, the Benetton Academic Research Foundation of Italy, the Hammer family of Petro American Petroleum, today Art Museum, Jindian Group, Baolong Group, Artron Enterprise Group, Beijing Hanwei International Group and so on.