Song Kun, a female artist represented by the post-70s generation. Since 2015, Song Kun has continued to shape an ethnic group called the Animoids, and the characters in this series have their own code names, different shapes and personality characteristics. These images come from the artist herself and her real friends. As a practitioner of "holistic art" (Gesamtkunstwerk), Song Kun describes her creative process as preparing "a script", but "this script is not arbitrarily definable, but grows in an unconventional narrative style that travels through the real and subconscious worlds".
Presented by Kering Women In Motion 跃动她影
Jointly launched in November 2021 by Shanghai Qiao Space and Perrotin Gallery, Song Kun's solo exhibition "Animism Pure World: Fish People Weeping Pearls" focuses on her new creations in the past two years, from her past theme of "Oriental Glass Pure Land" to a series of works focusing on "body" and "real survival experience", blending the fish people in ancient Chinese mythology with the Oriental Cyborg representing the future of science and technology, presenting a dimensional world that mixes multiculturalism and imagination.
"Animism Pure World: Crying Pearls" at the exhibition site of Qiao Space in Shanghai
"Painting is a long gaze, I have always felt a bit like an old craftsman, very calmly depicting a favorite image, as if often living in the subconscious world, sometimes I don't know where I am, who is it? In the repeated and simple actions, they often disappear, feelings are slowly injected into it, and some things will be purified and precipitated, perhaps like the Creator, shaping the favorite and most interested people and memory fragments, so that they can stay around. ”
Artist Song Kun
"For each series of works, I usually draw up a theme in advance, an overall framework, and the character determination of each series of works, the shaping of the image, the relationship between the images, and finally the details such as the exhibition site and the spatial atmosphere are all carried out around this." I would be immersed in this infrastructure for a long time, would not change much, would refuse to interfere with me, and would only work in this system. But when it comes to the thinking behind the solo painting, the thinking and life experience flowing behind each still frame image, the source of emotion and the context, I will use music and video works to provide a more three-dimensional dimension for each series. ”
Can you imagine the deep-sea surge of that Emo? In the music scene called "Fish People Crying Pearls - Wave", Song Kun invited several groups of musician friends (DJ and VJ) and aerial yoga dancers to jointly perform the opening scene related to the theme of the exhibition: the affectionate duet between Song Kun and Zhu Jingxi, the "Oriental Cyber Singer"; Song Kun and her friends (musician Huzi Huzi and the trend singer-songwriter reversed) free and undefined style; the improvised and beautiful body performance of the air dancers; the psychedelic and dark DJ Set in the late night by the artist Chen Tianzhao Coupled with the paintings, installations, and MV images at the exhibition site, they together take the viewer out of the boring real world and dive into the ethereal but sincere and fierce "animistic world" she created.
Pictured on the left "Fish People Weeping Beads. Wave" Live performance scene; the picture on the right is a Live performance poster, which interprets the performance concept in totem font (poster design: lazy bar)
Zhu Jingxi, "Oriental Cyber Geji", was at the scene of the MV exhibition of "Fish People Crying Pearls"
Starting with her first solo exhibition in 2006, "It is my life, this is my life", Song Kun began to try to start each series of works with a "director-screenwriter" approach: selecting keyframes from the image material accumulated over a long period of time, gradually constructing the theme "script" explored for each exhibition with a divergent unconventional narrative and the invisible clues hidden in the exhibition by the artist, and then transitioning from individual work to team work.
"It is My Life" (2006 Universal Studio Beijing) exhibition venue
The American scholar Hou Shida in "Gödel, Escher, Bach", the music and image works to give the characteristics of palindromic poetry, so that the seemingly unrelated two art forms have a connection; the same is true in Song Kun's case, she regards painting as a static traditional creative image, MV such as three-dimensional images containing images, music, lyrics, etc., so that her flowing emotional context can be fully displayed, and form an intertextual relationship with her paintings. "Walking" between the visual and auditory experiential situations composed of painting images and music has become Song Kun's most representative creative practice, allowing the audience to perceive the artist's works in a more informative and multi-dimensional way in the exhibition.
"The fish people cry beads. Wave" Live show scene
Behind-the-scenes photos of Song Kun during rehearsals in the studio (Photographer: Dong Lin)
In the video of the MV Ocean (2021), "Fall into the 2D world, I am the mother, the copy, the body, I am" ying er every audience, "Oriental Cyber Geji" Zhu Jingxi cooperated with her at the invitation of Song Kun. According to the concept of creation, Song Kun created two roles of "Fish Man" and "Cyber Geji", played by herself and Zhu Jingxi, the musical lyrics of this work are also the emotional core of this solo exhibition, composed by Song Kun, and interpreted by the two in the form of duets; thus the cooperation with the music producer Huzi, the animator Xie Linyou and the dancer Wo Wang's team is also very tacit. In the hidden place unknown to the audience, Song Kun injects her habits of long-term cohesion, purification of daily life and silent observation into her creation, and lingers a secret and deep emotion for the work, such as the various imprisoned postures of people in the paintings of "Barrier Flame", "Animoid - Spring Dawn", "Animoid - Silencer", or the way of slicing and disguising the exhibition of works, just like the feeling of time and space dislocation caused by the isolation of the flesh during the epidemic.
MV video work "Fish People Crying Pearls" / Dynamic Screenshot / 2021
Pearl oysters on the sea and smog cities
/MV Video Work "Fish People Crying Pearl" Still Frame Screenshot / 2021
Animism - The First Generation of FishMen/ Oil on Canvas, Shaping Paste, Glass Beads, Luminous Colors / 2021
Song Kun was born in Inner Mongolia, and his father's ancestral home was Penglai. The vast grassland daqing mountains and the mysterious ocean connected by heaven and water are the scenes she remembers most deeply from her childhood. From the age of fourteen, Song Kun moved to Beijing to study, from the Affiliated Middle School of the Academy of Fine Arts to the Third Studio of the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and the imprint of life that grew up in nature seems to have become a prerequisite for natural biological elements, empty blanks or tension in her works. Perhaps by nature, Song Kun respects Chinese traditions and immerses himself in the aesthetic system of oriental modeling, but at the same time dislikes the cynicism of art and culture. In the era when she grew up, the urban process developed rapidly, subculture, animation, rock music, etc. swept the urban youth, in the center of the pop culture storm, she was born to like fantasy, full of emotion and imagination, she indulged in a variety of attractive artistic experiments, exerting creativity, trying to integrate the elements and media that touched her into the work, such as various anime models, cyborg aesthetics, independent music, writing songs, making Music Videos, etc.
Cyborg Body / Oil on canvas / 2018
As early as the last century, the theme of "fantasy" appeared in the literary branch, which is different from the real world we live in, but it is based on reality, and the prophetic, sci-fi utopian life makes people think about it. In Song Kun's view, the end of the world and The Mayan prophecy that triggered the boom in 2012 can be seen as the enlightenment of the era stage, so Cyborg naturally entered the artist's painting language of "fantasy" for the new era, and has also become the creative motif that continues to this day. "Animism Pure World" (Oriental Glass Pure Land) is a new series launched by Song Kun around 2015, unlike the world under the Western language in Plato's Republic or Thomas More's "Utopia", in the Pure Land of the Medicine Buddha in the Eastern Elysium World, the purity of "self-luminescence, beyond human imagination", that is, "transparent worlds", expands her artistic imagination.
Pure Land Landscape / Oil on canvas / 2015
Asura Island (installation local)/Integrated Media/2016
Animism Pure Realm Organisms (Local) / Transparent Synthetic Materials, Led Lighting Installations / 2018
In the exhibition "Animistic Pure Realm: Fish People Weeping Pearls", Song Kun spreads the Oriental Glass Pure Land and Cybertron to the corner of the "Fish People" recorded in the ancient Zhiwei novel collection "Search for God" ("There are fish people outside the South China Sea, the water lives like fish, and does not waste weaving. If his eyes cry, he can produce beads"). Different from the story of the little mermaid who sacrificed for love in public memory and transformed into a bubble, the amphibious identity of the "fish people", textile skills, and tears into beads made Song Kun have a more specific and more possible creative space. In the MV video work "Fish People Crying Pearls" (2021), she gradually intertwines the fish people on the sea (Song Kun) and the cyber jellyfish body with the science fiction urban plot; Cyber (Zhu Jingxi) whispers alone on the catwalk and under the spotlight of the empty theater stage, and the picture travels between the two time and space... The film shows not only the shaping of the character image, but also the use of those figurative and withdrawn composite elements through the sublimation of her thoughts. The elements of the natural ocean, urban life and music creation seem to once again respond to Song Kun's growth trajectory from nature to the city, which is probably the trace of her core spiritual world.
MV video work "Fish People Crying Pearls" / Dynamic Screenshot / 2021
Sea Mackerel
/ Screenshot of the still frame of the MV video work "The Weeping Pearls of the Fish" / 2021
In Song Kun's paintings, female models and her self-portraits are common, and this is perhaps the easiest object for every artist who paints a figure — himself or a friend around him. "I like people with characteristics, who can have bugs, but not greasy, don't pretend, I fantasize about connecting with various characters and identities, which make me excited and fascinated, and I want to dig." 」 In the exhibition, Song Kun's painting "Cyber Geji - Zhu Jingxi", after she selected the model style, she forged a new oriental face with unique gestures, oriental martial arts buns, dragon tattoos and other characteristics.
Cyber Geji - Zhu Jingxi / Oil on canvas, luminous, glass beads / 2021
When asked whether there is a special conveyance significance when painting women and self-portraits, Song Kun laughed and said that he did not think too much, "As a woman, more often I feel as if I am an experimental object of the times, I experience the various feelings I have gained through the female body: or touching moments, or gentle experiences, those sensitive and delicate, relatively emotional things will be naturally integrated into the creation, even in the work of the weekday studio, in the face of large-scale paintings, sculptures, installations or staying up late to prepare for the exhibition work and other physical work, Will briefly forget their gender. ”
Fish People Crying Beads - Heart / Oil on canvas, Luminous Colors / 2021
Presented by
Kering Women In Motion jumped her in the shadows
In 2015, at the Cannes Film Festival, Kering launched the "Leap Her Film" project to recognize female filmmakers in front of and behind the camera. The "Moving Her Film" project continues to grow and expand from the field of film to photography, art and literature, as well as dance and choreography. Through a series of awards, the "Leaping Her Shadow" project recognizes outstanding people and talented women who have made important contributions to the industry, and in 2021, Leaping Her Shadow in China was officially upgraded to a global social platform focusing on the interaction and reporting of female artists, exploring the voices and faces of women behind artistic creation, as well as their unique hearts and minds.
Over the past seven years, the "Leap Her Film" project has also become a pioneering platform for changing perceptions, calling on society to reflect on the role women play in major arts fields and whether they are getting enough attention and recognition.
Video Directors: Chen Li liliana CHEN, Feng Yinghui FI FENG
Graphic photography: Zhao Hua ZHAO HUA
Styling: Sun Jing VIVIENNE SUN
Editors: Zhang Jing, MIA ZHANG, Zhou Hezi
Written by: Du Fan DUFFY
Co-ordinator: Kaka CAROLINE SHEN
Producer: Tongtong JOSH TONG
Makeup: Hovin
Hairstyle: Andy
Executive Styling: Koi
Images of the work are available as:
Artist with Behauden | Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
Fine Arts: Roland