Song Ling: I'm Also Starting to Have Desires
In 2013, Song Ling decided to go back to Hangzhou and set up his own studio here after staying in Australia for 27 years. To him, it marked a brand new start.
In 1988, when the "85 New Wave Movement" was in its full swing, as a member of the "Pond Society" and important participant of the exhibition 1985 New Space, Song Ling chose to "escape": he moved to Australia, got married, had a son, and became a half-Australian. During the process, he didn't really give up painting and had several exhibitions in Australia. But on the whole he was at a relatively marginal position and missed the 1989 China Avant-Garde Exhibition, the emergence of Chinese contemporary on the global stage in the 1990s, new media experiments, conceptual art movement and the drastic developments of Chinese contemporary art since the threshold of the 21st century. By the time when he came back to China in 2013, the first wave of Chinese contemporary art movement had come to a temporary halt and bubbles around the art market had burst. With the increasing growth of the art system which had witnessed the emergence and booming development of art museums, galleries, biennales, art fairs and art zones, it seemed the art market was entering a new stage featuring rational development.
When Song Ling came back he immediately saw in his previous "comrade-in-arms" such as Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi and Wang Qiang as well as young artists who were completely new to him the verve and energy that had been lost for quite some time in himself. It refreshed his memories of the New Wave Movement in the 1980s. As a witness and participant of those vibrant years, even though now the time and environment changed, his passion was reignited. At that moment, he decided to stay in China to revive the passion and ideals that had been lost in the 20 years of mundane life in Australia. It was also at that moment that he said "I'm also starting to have desires".
The exhibition could be deemed as a review of the past ten years since Song's return and the four series on view, namely Fabricated, Study, Animal and Make Ado about Nothing, have all been created during this period. Meaningless Choice No. 61 (2013) was the very first piece of work he created after his return; and the most recent series Make Ado about Nothing (2022) was created during the Covid-19 pandemic. Meaningless Choice No. 61? is a diptych featuring two symmetrical camels in standing posture and leaning towards each other. As a continuance of his signature use of flat brushstroke and black-and-white color, even though he retains the basic form and light-shadow structure of camel, the camels in his work seem to have been deprived of the details supposed to be seen in the body of animal. The overall image is reminiscent of both fine delineation in charcoal as well as black-and-white photography. Similar to the Human – Pipeline series he created during the 85 New Wave, the image radiates a sense of "loneliness, indifference and mystery", keeping a distance from the bodies and emotions of the viewers. In the eyes of viewers, what the artist depicts is more like an "object" than a camel. This kind of painting language that has been deprived of all emotions and physical perceptions seems to confirm that "painting is object". The "object" here refers to new subject brimming with initiative rather than a merely "thing".
Such an idea runs through all his practice. Under his painting brush, animals are not animals, architecture not architecture, utensils not utensils, landscape not landscape, and food not food… Skeleton turns into "marble" (Wildlife – Skull, 2015); injector, mechanical device (Fabricated series, 2015-2017); mechanical device, ballet dancer (Simulation series, 2019); birds and insects mutate into mechanical birds and insects (A Study of Album of Song Dynasty, 2018); ancient landscape, futuristic architecture (A Study of Hong Ren's Album of Landscape Studies, A Study of Song Dynasty Album, A Study of Bada Shanren and A Study of Ma Yuan, 2021 - 2022); and inside of food, spine and viscera of human beings (Make Ado about Nothing, 2022)… What the artist endeavors to do is neither to reveal the alienation of object or nature nor to express concern over industrialization and technologies; on the contrary, he intends to endow these objects, the nature and technologies with new image and new verve. The "absence of human beings" lays a deeper foundation for these works and differentiates them from his previous works (i.e. the Human – Pipeline series). Probably the self-materialization, self-technicalization and self-colonization of human beings are exactly what the artist truly wants to express and "being-towards-death" of the post-anthropocene is virtually the real theme of these works.
"I'm also starting to have desires". It's both a mourning of one's own history and a perpetual warning of the present and future brimming with uncertainties. Take the Make Ado about Nothing series created during the pandemic for instance. Daily objects such as blade, lighter, tomato, poker card, bulb, pin, matchbox and glasses that have been magnified several times, even dozes of times, are presented in front of viewers like specimens from the field. In his works, the objects that were once integral parts of our life are mutated and deprived of any sense of dailiness. But in the meantime, they seem to radiate a looming sense of upset and threat as if they'd stab us at any time. In this sense, it is the painting-object rather than the painted objects that occupies the perception territory of the artist and us; and it is the desires of the painting itself rather than of the artist that drag the artist and us into danger.
