1. A Background for Zeitgeist
Between three and five during the afternoon of 4 November 1986, the brothers Song Yongping and Song Yonghong did a performance piece at the first exhibition of the Three-Step Studio, held in the Workers Palace in Taiyuan, Shanxi province. The brothers went through the motions of the ancient activity of pottery making. Several sets of tree trunks lashed together and painted black were arranged in an area that was painted red. The two artists wrapped their bodies in red and white fabric, the one wrapped in red also painted his head red, and the one wrapped in white painted his head white. The clay, potters’ wheels and other props were painted red, black or white. The brothers moved slowly as they turned the red wheels and black earthenware. The stated purpose of the performance was to ‘peer into the core of nature’ by altering environment and behavior. The performers declared that ‘the occurrence, development, and final obliteration of all worldly thing sare prompted by a transcendent primordial formative force,and that human participation in artistic activities is an unconscious participation in this tremendous natural force’. The basic red and black were an extension of the eye-catching heavy red and black theme of the exhibition, and the tree branches, earthenware and iron wheels were intended to be symbols of ancient life, so that ‘unconscious participation’ and the pursuit of spontaneous creativity were in harmony. But the work was intended to demonstrate that this could only result in ‘stepping from one suffocation to the next and breaking free from one set of chains but being unable to do anything but take on another set of chains’. The performing brothers stated that ‘their thoughts are scattered and cannot be gathered, and their nervous system seems to be tightly wrapped up by a formless object, their nerves jangling insanely’. The eminent critic Gao Minglu, in his Contemporary Chinese Art History 1985-1986 (Zhongguo dangdai meishu shi, 1985-1986), attended the performance and described how at the same time, unrelated images appeared before the eyes of the performing brothers, ‘a fire net of confusion, a dry leaf, nonsense, an ant, water in the gutter, a shaving knife …’.This is one of the earliest records of Song Yonghong’s artistic activities.
In 1986, Song Yonghong was still studying in the woodblock printing department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, andit was while travelling through rural areas of Shanxion a research field trip that he participated in this event, the Second Contemporary Art Exhibition, considered one of China’s earliest performance art events. At that time, participating in unusual art events that were extra-curricular activities required great self-motivation and strength. Song’s performance expressed the Zeitgeist, and many young intellectuals in the 1980s were fond of using this Hegelian philosophical term, although the term was used loosely and had lost much of its original meaning. Some conservatives and intellectuals derided or express expressed dissatisfaction dissatisfaction regarding the use of Western thought by young artists. In fact, the artists were never particularly concerned with the original meanings of terms, but simply wanted to freely express their inner worlds and produce works of art in this torrent of liberating thought. Therefore, Zeitgeist, even though this word was already passé by 1988, was no more than a summary of a current of modern thought which originated in the late seventies but reached its climax in the mid-eighties, the trend of thought that is often referred to as the ’85 New Wave or the ’85 Art Movement.
The nineteenth century Western Zeitgeist was very different from that of China in the 1980s. Western artists had begun to abhor academism and dogmatic realism. After the emergence of impressionism, Western modernist art advanced in accordance with the logic of artistic language. However Gao Minglu and others focused on the art movement that took place in China from 1985 to 1986, when realism instead represented a departure from the dominant artistic thinking through the perpetuation of the basis of its unique sentiment, and so these critics conceived of this movement and its precursors in the late seventies as focusing on human art that had broken free from ideological themes. After a short period of denunciation and psychological consolation, people began to see phenomena that differed drastically from those of the past, from the Scar Art of Sichuan to the Stars in Beijing, demonstrating that art circles were reading a simultaneous narrative of realism, expressionism and symbolism.
Works by Cheng Conglin, Luo Zhongli, He Duoling and Wang Hai revealed an inner sorrow and gray emotions that transcended the clear political standpoint of the slightly earlier period, even though behind each individual’s artistic language there was strong artistic support. For example, in the dramatic scene in Cheng Conglin’s Snow on an Unrecorded Day in 1968(1968 nian X yue X ri xue) we can see something of Vasily Ivanovich Surikov; we can see traces of Chuck Close’s brushstrokes in Luo Zhongli’s Father (Fuqin); and we sense flavors of Andrew Wyeth in He Duoling’s Awakened Spring Breeze (Chunfeng yijing suxing). The inner worlds these artists wished to express are completely different. Freedom in spirit was expressed through a replay of history and experience, while others were moved by the related stories of the spirit.
Founded in late 1979, the history of the Stars helps us to understand the political reality of that time. In contrast to Sichuan’s Scar Art, the Star Artists, who saw themselves as ‘fighters’ (doushi), used an artistic language distant from realism. Works like Wang Keping’s Idol (Wanwansui) adopted symbolist techniques to pursue a mission of condemnation. Other works, such as Ma Desheng’s Breath (Xi), used the language of expressionism to strengthen art’s power of expression. Even the logic of abstract art was used to express revolt, and so there is an extreme and deeply felt discontent beneath the surface reality of these works.
In the early eighties, the artists’ criticism of the past, especially the Cultural Revolution, adopted a sort of rational understanding, specifically, to restore ‘beauty’ (mei) to ‘art’ (meishu). Most people remembered how, even a few years previously, people had no idea what type of beauty was politically acceptable. This inability signaled a naiveté that regarded beauty as something isolated and abstract and which, if identified, would bring political trouble. People cited Mao Zedong: ‘Revolution is not a banquet, and it is not writing essays, it’s not painting or embroidery’. Beauty had become a formal embodiment of the revolutionary and political standpoint,but now young people and courageous middle-aged artists began to disentangle beauty from politics and everyday matters, as exemplified by Yuan Yunsheng’s widely debated muralWater Splashing Festival (Poshuijie)commissioned by Beijing’s Capital Airport. This work signaled a new appreciation of the primitive and of life itself, and formalism was gradually becoming a meaningful form.
All debates and confusion in the art scene of the early eighties focused on one fundamental point, winning the greatest possible freedom for art. Other questions were subsidiary to this primary concern, for example, the relationship between form and content, the possibility of ‘self-expression’ (ziwo biaoxian), the core meaning of ‘realism’ (xieshizhuyi and xianshi zhuyi), and the functions and essence of aestheticism or art. Even though there was no consensus of understanding among artists on any of these questions, young artists participated in this healthy and chaotic debate,and their thinking gradually changed,so that by May 1985, a clear acceptance of modernism had occurred. Paintings such as Yuan Qingyi’s Coming of Spring (Chuntian laile), Li Guijun’s Studio (Huashi) and Yu Xiaofu’s Children Comforting Picasso’s Pigeons (Haizimen anwei Bijiasuo de gezi)confronted the viewer, but the most powerful work was In the New Age (Zai xin shidai), a joint effort of Meng Luding and Zhang Qun, students at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. This ‘propaganda painting’ (xuanchuan hua) adopted a surrealist style to depict the tremendous changes taking place, and the male and female figures (Adam and Eve) that exuded an altruism borrowed from Christianity were deployed as signifiers of the awakening of the Chinese people. Subjecting this work to the official political and artistic standards of the past, no other painting was so lacking in traditional ethics and so disregarded the basic aesthetic habits of the Chinese viewer. The exhibition titled The Progressive Chinese Youth Art Exhibition held under the auspices the Committee of the International Youth Year (May 1985) not only rapidly surpassed the influence of the previous Sixth National Art Exhibition (October 1984), but more importantly, because of the official status of the organizers, greatly encouraged artists from the entire country to believe they could finally throw off official artistic standards and take full advantage of their own potential.
In September 1984, Song Yonghong was admitted to the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts which by that time was in the frontline of the new era of modernism. One year later, Song Yonghong viewed the graduation projects of several senior students under the guidance of his professor, Jin Yide. In complete contrast to many other works, Geng Jianyi’s Two People under the Lamp (Deng xia de liangge ren) simplified actual physicality, constructing an intense image using detached gray tones. This type of depiction has been described by critic Gao Minglu as a metaphor that ‘allows people to relate to the loneliness generated by life in contemporary society’. ‘Loneliness’ (gudu) was a term sporadically used in the mid-eighties, denoting an emotional state common among young people. For conservative professors, this emotional state was considered unhealthy, and the very idea of expressing personal ideas was regarded as unacceptable. During the graduation show in 1985 at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, the atmosphere was tense yet stimulating, and Professor Jin Yide calmly addressed those who had gathered at the exhibition: ‘Under the premise of implementing the Communist Party’s guidelines for art and education, we emphasize the development of each student’s strengths, allowing their work to have a rich individuality. We demand that students express genuine sentiments, courageously explore new modes of expression and seek their own artistic language’.[1] At that time, no one investigated Jin Yide’s heterodox statement, even if he had protected himself by prefacing his remarks with the phrase, ‘under the premise of implementing the Party’s guidelines for art and education’.The question of interpreting ‘real sentiment’ (zhenqing-shigan)was problematic. In urging his students to ‘explore courageously new modes of expression’, Jin gave the nod to experimentation, but was experimentation possible without throwing off the sanctioned basis of realism and distancing oneself from the time-worn interpretation of realism? Many years later, Song Yonghong recalled the impact on him of those days at school and the information offered by professors and senior students:
In 1986, Gu Wenda became well known in the China, while others, including Zhang Peili and the experimental group from Zhejiang’s Pool Society (Chi She), several young artist groups at Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, were a great influence on our ways of thinking. Furthermore, Fine Arts in China(Zhongguo meishu bao), Jiangsu Art Monthly (Jiangsu huakan) and the newest information available in the library, were all read eagerly each month.[2]
Over-anxiety was probably unwarranted. In those heady days, people enjoyed a new-found liberation and freedom and ideological restrictions were not consistently applied. Even though works such as Zhang Keduan’s Winter Grassland (Dongji caoyuan), Lin Chun’s Old Python (Lao Ran), Wei Xiaolin’s Yellow River Series: Beach (Huanghe zuhua: Tan) and Chen Ren’s Breakthrough (Tupo) were called into question by different levels of the ideological hierarchy, they still made a remarkable impression on the students and staff at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts.
In fact, around 1985 the tide of the New Wave was in full flow:
July 1984: In northern China, Wang Guanyi, Shu Qun, Ren Jian, Liu Yan, and eleven others formed the Northern Artists Group (Beifang Yishu Qunti) in Harbin, and in southern China, the Wildgrass Art Group (Yecao Huahui) was founded in Xiangtan, Hunan.Originality and expressiveness soon became characteristic of Hunan artists. In December of the same year, the exhibition titled Exploration, Discovery and Expression was held in the north-western city of Lanzhou.
In January 1985, Art Trends (Meishu sichao), a bimonthly journal focusing on art theory, was founded in the Central Plains city of Wuhan. During the eighties, the high tide of modernism, the journal became an influential source of modern theories. In March 1985, the Guangzhou Art Academy Research Committee was founded by students and young teachers, and Li Zhengtian, relying on his political experience and deep understanding of art, became an important modernist influence in the Guangdong region. June and July saw the First Exhibition of New Figurative Imagesshowcasing works by Mao Xuhui, Pan Dehai, Zhang Xiaogang, Hou Wenyi, Zhang Long and other artists from Kunming in Yunnan province.The exhibition was held concurrently at a cultural center in the Jing’an district of Shanghai, and at a health education center in Nanjing. The expressionism from the southwest came as a shock in Shanghai and Nanjing. In July of the same year, the seventh issue of Jiangsu Art Monthly carried Li Xiaoshan’s article ‘My Views on Chinese Painting’ (Zhongguo hua zhi wo jian), a lively and audacious essay that launched a wide debate on the future of Chinese painting. In October, more surrealist works by young artists such as Ding Fang, Shen Qin, Chai Xiaogang and Yang Zhilin were included in Jiangsu Youth Art Week: Contemporary Art Exhibition. In November in Beijing, in addition to the modernist November Exhibition, Robert Rauschenberg’s international touringexhibition was shown in Beijing from 18 November to 8 December, and in Lhasa from 2 December to 23 December, respectively. This contemporary American artist would have a direct and ongoing influence on Chinese artists and critics. During the first half of December, Song Yonghong was a spectator at the ’85 New Space Exhibition in the gallery of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. This exhibition was organized by the Zhejiang branch of the Chinese Artists’ Association and the Youth Creativity Society (Qingnian Chuangzuo She). On 31 December, the Contemporary Art Exhibition opened in Taiyuan. Song Yonghong’s brother, Song Yongping, was one of the participating artists, and he had also been involved in the Beijing segment of Robert Rauschenberg’s touring exhibition. Rauschenberg’s influence was likely an important factor in the new art experiments of the Song brothers.[3]
In 1986, the developments in modernist ideas were startling, and young artists from all over the country sensed the imminent advent of dramatic change. They corresponded about artistic ideas, exchanged views on art, and, if possible, teamed up with artists from other cities known to be involved in contemporary art. Artists from all over the country were in contact with each other, staging exhibitions and holding parties, passionately savoring the taste of the contemporary.
During the course of the 1985 Art Movement, critics summarized and classified artistic phenomena. Although long familiar with impressionism, they now began to understand the pop art that emerged in the West after World War II, and became increasingly familiar with performance art and conceptual art. In December 1986, there was even a performance art event at Peking University titled Concept 21: Performance Art.
In evaluating these new developments, the critic Gao Minglu disregarded the proliferation of technical terms and vocabularies used by artists and critics and divided the modernism of this period into two main currents: the ‘tide of rationality’ (lixing zhi chao) and the ‘stream of life’ (shengming zhi liu). He used these two ambiguous terms to sum up all artistic phenomena in China. However, contemporary critics were perplexed by the question of whether to begin from the perspective of artistic language or ideas, from works seen as a synchronic expression or as part of a diachronic stylistic development. Artists that used expressionist methodologies were generally placed in the ‘stream of life’ group, which therefore included artists from Xuzhou and Nanjing such as Wu Pingren, Qu Yan, Fan Bo, Zhu Xiaogang, Fu Zenan and others. However, artists who were closer to expressionism stylistically, including artists from Kunming who had participated in New Figurative Images events, such as Mao Xuhui, Zhang Xiaogang and Ye Yongqing, actually exerted a more enduring and wider influence. In August 1986, these artists formed the Southwestern Art Research Group. They were concerned with deep human experiences, as described in one of their publications: ‘Between any two given objects there exists a realm that is ambiguous yet boundless, just as between life and death there is a realm of dreaming in which the body rests’.[4] This was Zhang Xiaogang’s concept of the ‘agitation of the soul’ (linghun bodong) introduced in 1986. Of similar import is a statement by another artist of the group, Mao Xuhui: ‘The human commonality detected and experienced from an individual’s unique perspective forms the center and essence of a problem’.[5]
The impetuous artists who made up the ‘stream of life’ group have symbolic significance, and in the late eighties, the expression of the passion or oppression of their inner worlds was irrepressible, echoing the response in the society of that period to cultural events:
In March, People’s Literature (Renmin wenxue) published Mo Yan’s novel Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang), which was later made into a film that depicted bravery, righteousness and a primitive spirit and became a vivid example of the expressionistic thinking in the Chinese art world. On 23 February 1988, Red Sorghum was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. This contributed to the rapid exposure of ‘new realist’ and ‘new historical’ novels written since 1986 to readers and audiences. Related to the literature that tackled themes of ‘searching for roots’ (xungen), the basic characteristics of ‘new realist’ literature were the elimination of the dominating role of ideology, the abandonment of a peculiar political stance, and an observation of life, history and reality from the perspective of the masses distanced from the earlier demands that realism must be politically functional. The exaggeration of the untamed and primitive nature in Red Sorghum was a logical expression of the pursuit of what is the essence of reality.
On 10 June, Deng Xiaoping, the leader in control of development in this period, made the following remark while listening to economic reports: ‘As it is now, without reforms to the political system, there will be incongruities in the present situation. The reforms should include reform of the political system, and moreover, the reform of the political system should be symbolic of reform in general’.
Between 15 and 19 August, under the auspices of Fine Arts in China and the Zhuhai Art Academy, Gao Minglu, Shu Qun and Wang Guangyi convened the ’85 Youth Art Trends: Large-Scale Slide Exhibition and Academic Symposium, otherwise known as the Zhuhai Meeting, which was attended by nearly 40 artists, critics, and journalists, and was seen as a preparatory meeting for the next step in the contemporary modernist movement.
From 28 September to 5 October, Huang Yongping and others organized the Xiamen ’86 New Dada Modern Art Exhibition, which was regarded as remarkable when at the close of the event artists immolated the works they had just exhibited. This event marked the beginning of an art that increasingly sought to eliminate meaning.
From 20 to 30 November, like a local militia legally parading through a city, the Hunan Young Artists Group Exhibition went to stage an exhibition at the China Art Gallery, now called the National Art Museum of China. Critics studying the developments in art sensed, from this group exhibition, a tendency towards individualism.
On 21 October, Poetry News (Shige bao)and Shenzhen Youth Journal (shenzhen qingnian bao) jointly published the Group Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Poetry, 1986 (Zhongguo shitan 1986 xiandai shi qunti dazhan), a celebration in poetic circles which led those familiar with the history of Western modernism to consider the past of avant-garde poetry.
In December, some university students from Beijing, Shanghai and Hefei staged a street demonstration, and People’s Daily (Renmin ribao) published an editorial titled ‘Value and Develop a Stable Collective Political Situation’ (Zhenxi he fazhan anding tuanjie de zhengzhi jumian) and a critical piece titled ‘Reform of the Political System Can Only Be Carried Out by the Party’ (Zhengzhi tizhi gaige zhi neng zai dang de lingdao xia jinxing). ‘Bourgeois liberalization’ (zichanjieji ziyouhua) was seen as a political issue that had to be ‘resolved’ in the present period, and art was unable to avoid these political measures.
The above events comprise one coherent period marked by an irrepressible outpouring of romanticism and expressionism. It was only after the China Avant-Garde Art Exhibition in February 1989 that people finally agreed with the sensitivity to realities shown by many earlier artists, who maintained that all ‘meanings’ generated by modernism needed to be eliminated, especially those directly related to real politics.
Song Yonghong graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts at a time when the Chinese art world had begun to doubt modernism. He was assigned to work as a teacher at the Beijing Arts and Crafts Academy (Beijing Shi Gongyi Meishu Xuexiao), now the Beijing School of Design (Beijing Shejie Xueyuan). Up to this point, Song Yonghong’s career was indistinguishable from that of many other art students. Even though modernism regained space for development in 1988, the concerns expressed by critics revealed considerable ambiguity towards the new directions in art, but Song Yonghong already had a rough understanding of the recent trends, the chaotic ideas, unclear styles and the critique of modernism expressed by Wang Guangyi as ‘cleaning away humanistic enthusiasm’ (qingli renwen reqing). The situation was confusing, but it was still possible to sense the approach of a new period in art.
Reflection on the new sensibility had already been revealed at the Huangshan Conference in 1988, which Song Yonghong attended and which left an indelible impression on his thinking.[6] At this chaotic yet ebullient conference, artists expressed their ideas on the rejection of meaning, few realizing perhaps that the artistic collectives would soon be dismantled.[7] Even though Gao Minglu later realized that this event signaled later changes in art in the nineties, [8] at that time critics like him, who were the leaders of movements in art, believed that contemporary art would only possess historical value if it was guided by theoretical concepts.[9] They never realized that the artists had already begun to become independent, and were moving towards an unpredictable future by themselves.
2. The Beginning of the Artist’s Career
My mother was a teacher and my father was a military man. I went with my parents to the northern provinces when I was young, andfor a year we lived in a mountain valley, then for another three or four years in a county town. In 1976, my father was assigned to work in an enterprise in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, so our family settled there. Soon afterwards, my father had a stroke, and was hospitalized for half a year. It took him three years to recover. My mother was a Chinese teacher at the enterprise’s high school, but because of my father’s poor health my mother needed to provide him with constant care. This meant that no one took care of me. At the time, I didn’t like studying, and was becoming wild. My father’s parenting mostly consisted of punches and kicks. That was the family environment I grew up in.[10]
Song Yonghong was not fond of studying, and, according to the artist’s own recollection, in his physical education class he always finished last in races. Because his grades in all subjects were poor, his teachers also did not particularly like him, but his art teacher saw that he had talent: ‘She thought I was talented at drawing, so she often praised me in class, although this was the only praise I received during my five years of elementary school’. His sensitivity to images was innate, and because he was not preoccupied with his studies, he spent time alone at home reading magazines and pictorials, which left a great impression on him. Those images may have had nothing to do with painting, but the images stimulated his response to form, as with the classical aesthetics of ‘inner imitation’ (nei mofang). Song Yonghong thought the images in the pictorials to be sacred, and they aroused his interest in copy sketching. With encouragement from his young friends who all said his paintings were like real life, his inner drive to paint was nurtured.
Every artist has experiences from his or her earlier years that are remembered in vivid detail, and for Song it was the encouragement he received for his early imaginative drawings. His brother was studying at an art college in another city, and never forgot to send him paints. The poor grades he received in other school subjects were another element that he encouraged his interest in painting. After submitting numerous applications and expending considerable effort, Song Yonghong was finally admitted to the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1984. There he frequented the school library, ‘to look at works by Picasso, Cezanne, Matisse and Van Gogh, and attempted to copy the masters’ compositions. ‘After a while, my feel improved and I painted many works from memory. I studied at college for four years, and I have a complete visual record of that time. These exercises greatly helped and influenced me’. The curriculum at college was not innovative, but the teaching methods were flexible and effective. Song Yonghong has particularly fond memories of his teacher Wang Gongyi, because he was a teacher who allowed his students to freely feel their subjects, and to present work based on their own feelings. Song commented: ‘In my last year, I got all around the campus and the entire school knew who I was’.
His brother Song Yongping persuaded Song Yonghong to go to Beijing after graduation. Even though Beijing in 1988 was not the Mecca for free wheeling artists that it would eventually became, Beijing’s history and position at the center of politics and culture often made it the destination for ambitious young people, and so, in the second half of 1988, Song Yonghong reluctantly gave up the position he gained with the help of his professor Han Likun in Zhejiang and travelled to Beijing. Liu Chun has described his life after arriving there:
When he arrived in Beijing he was very miserable and had nothing. He didn’t know anyone, his salary was low, he couldn’t afford to buy paint and he didn’t even have basic nutrition. At the time, he felt very bad, even desperate, and thought he would never make it in Beijing. He had even called Professor Han Likun, and asked to be reassigned back to the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, but he knew this was impossible.[11]
The works he exhibited with Wang Jinsong in 1990 were almost all completed within one year of his arrival in Beijing. He also showed two pieces, There’s No-one Selling Tickets (Wuren shoupiao) and The HeavensWill Change (Tian hui bianhua), at the China Avant-gardeart exhibition in February 1989. These exhibitions gave him an unexpected opportunity to sell his paintings, as he explains: ‘After paying the commission to the exhibition organizers, I still had more than two thousand yuan left over. This was an unexpected joy. Suddenly many pressing problems and difficulties were overcome, and I immediately felt that there was hope’. Nonetheless, his circumstances remained difficult, as Liu Chun records his description of the artist’s life at that time:
In September 1988, Song Yonghong had graduated from the Print Department at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, and had been assigned to teach at the Beijing Arts and Crafts College. For a recent graduate, there was little that could be bought on a meager double-digit salary. Once he had purchased paint, canvas and materials, plus paid for living necessities, he sometimes did not even have enough to eat. After Chinese New Year in 1989, I travelled to Beijing with a few other artists from Shanxi for the China Avant-gardeart exhibition. I went to visit Song Yonghong. At the time, he had recently moved into a derelict farmer’s house that was about to collapse in a village close to the school. The dark room they lived in was filled with mules and donkeys, and you could almost touch the animals’ snouts and rear-ends just by stretching out your hand. The stench was unbearable. He lived there with several other art students from Taiyuan. They only had one pot of clean water in which to prepare noodles or rice porridge everyday. Their lives were soSpartan that it was quite depressing. Every month he had to borrow money from colleagues to pay back the debts from the previous month. He could not even pay back the money he had borrowed from his university professors. The difficulties faced by his family meant that he entertained few prospects for the future. Even during summer and winter holidays he could not afford a trip home to visit his parents in Taiyuan, and could only stay at school and paint.[12]
This is the recollection of Liu Chun, Song Yonghong’s friend, but Song’s circumstances were similar to those of many artists from all over China who were gradually settling into Yuanmingyuan at that time. Even though he received a monthly allowance from the school, he was still no better off than the unemployed migrant artists.
Many artists share similar experiences with Song Yonghong, and it was also in their most difficult times that they too completed their earliest pieces. Prior to this, Song Yonghong had evinced nostalgia for life at his alma mater, but in his new medium-sized paintings, we can detect a cold detached indifference (lengmo). This mode of indifference can also be seen in the art of Zhang Peili and Geng Jianyi from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, and it distinguishes these artists from the southwestern painters, including Mao Xudong, Zhang Xiaogang and others. This ‘indifference’(lengmo) is also visible in Zhang Peili’s Diving (Tiaoshui) and in the disjunctive figural interaction in Geng Jianyi’s Two People (Liangge ren). The chill of this indifference appears to freeze objects in mid-air. Song Yonghong used oil paint, copper plate and other composite media in his experiments with constantly changing materials, reflecting his changeable state at that time. Although he had lived for four years at college, he did not feel this was a lifestyle with which he could feel familiar or close, but he also felt estranged from everyday life. In spirit and disposition, we can see the same indifference in the work of northern European artists of the early twentieth-century, whose indifference was not so much tranquility as it was an expression of restlessness. Song Yonghong’s paintingLife on Campus: Estranged Environment (Xiaoyuan shenghuo: Mosheng huanjing) did not have easy beginnings, and it shares with paintings from this period an unsettling condensation of movement in which restlessness is a distinct theme, rather than the unrestrained expression of the artist’s unconscious feelings. The artist never indulged his subconscious thoughts or instincts as other earlier expressionistic Chinese artists did. Whether depicting a figure in flight or flying objects, Song Yonghong seems intent on establishing a narrative relationship with his subjects, yet in his spatial composition that relationship is blurred, or, at most, connected with a seemingly simple object. Transformation goes unquestioned in his visual habits and expression.
Even though Song Yonghong’s studio left a lot to be desired, it was in that unique year, 1989, that Song Yongsong painted the series of works, which together with Wang Jinsong, he showed at the ultimately influential Song Yonghong and Wang Jinsong Painting Exhibition in 1990.[13]For Song Yonghong, it was a year in which his personal life was filled with fond memories as love or sex became an instinctive calling and summoned the artist to express it. In familiar confined spaces, streets, backyards or on subway trains, the artist realizes the relevance of these places to sexuality, and public spaces seem no different from private quarters. The only reality is the naked women who either arouse his curiosity, as in Shower (Muyu, 1989), fill him with excitement, as in Lover (Qingren, 1989), or induce a sense of incredulousness, as in Diving (Tiaoshui, 1989). Sex was not his exclusive focus, but most works from that year seem to have some proximity to that theme. We should also not discard the artist’s own record of his private life, in a small portrait done in oils titled Little Ha (Xiao Ha). The figure in the painting later became his wife and, although her facial expression is somewhat sullen, the rolling of her eyes conveys the hopes of youth.
The exhibition in 1990 elicited new concepts from critics. For example, Zhou Yan, a critic and professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, wrote an article for the exhibition titled ‘Mockery and Self-Ridicule: A Visual Expression of a State of Mind’ (Tiaokan yu zichao: Yizhong xintai de shijue biaoxian) that was published in Beijing Youth News(Beijing qingnian bao). In it he wrote:
This year, from the Central Academy of Fine Art’s gallery to the museums, exhibitions of the work of young artists have been frequently staged and among them is the Song Yonghong and Wang Jinsong Painting Exhibition at the Today Art Gallery. Attentive visitors might have noticed a common feature percolating through the images in these shows: a state of mind that can be rightly described as ‘mockery and self-ridicule’.
This sensibility might have been widespread, because after the events of 1989those who had once constantly responded to reality seemed to have lost direction. But it was a political environment and any attempt to understand the atmosphere as one that was shared by all urbanites is unrealistic. Under normal circumstances, people often have a sense of purpose, and from the perspective of society, this sense of purpose can be reflected in goals that lie somewhere between social ideals and personal aspirations. These ideals and aspirations invariably relate to a purposeful mental state. However, in the second half of 1989, most artists were in a state of confusion, and people were concerned about the future direction of society and politics. However, when people have totally lost a social direction for their concerns, what sort of mental state results? Given this dilemma, in art works of the post-1989 period, the environments of objects are unfixed or even flowing, the characters have no particular facial expressions and the figures appear to be in a state of numbness and confusion, lacking the guidance of society or ideals. Artists began to simply observe the lives around them, even when these might be limited to the sexual preoccupations of adolescents. On a windy street, a young woman’s skirts are lifted, i.e. Sudden Gust of Wind (Zhenfeng ouran xianxiang, 1989); someone showering in a shabby room is seen by a peeping tom, i.e. Shower (Muyu, 1989); or a woman suddenly appears in the window at night, as though conjured from a dream, i.e. Moonlight (Yuese, 1989). Song Yonghong later recalled:
Once I arrived in Beijing, I painted Gust of Wind (Zhenfeng chuiqi) which was considered excellent, but I didn’t understand why it was good. I just thought it was really interesting. Later on I realized it was my train of thoughts. At the time I wanted to combine these figurative imagesin absurd situations in order to convey some nasty idea. Every day I would try to imagine these feelings and suddenly a painting would emerge from daily scenes. It was very exciting!
A sense of the absurd and imagination are both innate, and once a particular daily scene is associated with what is spiritually innate, then a concrete image would be produced, but anyone can imagine the outcome of absurdity and conjecture. Nonetheless, these are all parts of an individual's life experience, a life that could be easily dismissed as boring. Zhou Yan used the term ‘mockery and self-ridicule’, however, in describing Song Yonghong’s paintings, although Wang Jinsong’s works were closer to mockery, because this artist emptied out his characters, confident that audiences would catch the implication of his mockery. More significantly, the objects on which Wang Jinsong focused, regardless of the scene, contain social and collective elements, and so through his paintings people can glimpse memories of history, even though the details and content might be quirky.
In his essay Zhou Yan pedantically analyzed the meanings of the terms ‘comical’ (guaji), ‘witty’ (huixie) and ‘humor’ (youmo), using the classical category of the ‘comedic’ (xijuxing). He applied a scale of humor to artists in the hope that they would have ‘the insight and wit’ to be able to present ‘a refraction of their attitude to life’. He warned artists to be vigilant in confronting lives ‘close to dissolution’ (jihu fangdang). Song Yonghong’s works completed in 1989 contain a new psychological reality that would soon be associated with the New Generation (Xin Shengdai) and Cynical Realism. The most outstanding feature of this reality was its complete lack of any classical comedy or elevated and educated humor.
In 1989, most modernist artists were subject to confusion and resentment, sporadically mouthing slogans about upholding contemporary art, but few artists were given to rational thinking. In that year Song Yonghong kept a record of his work and in one entry from December, Song Yonghong noted that human ‘instincts’ were now confined, a phenomenon Gao Minglu touched on when, in characterizing that year’s contemporary art exhibitions, he remarked that ‘it can’t always be art of the reproductive organs’. The intellectual ‘poverty’ of the period was more restrictive, because regardless of the depth of popular philosophical vocabularies, the artists’ sentiments were divided between the ideal and reality. Artists realized that the shift in political reality had forced them to make complex choices about what, for them, determined existence.
Song Yonghong’s diary entry for 25 December 1989 reads:
I’m probably not facing the obvious choices, and itmight have been more important to hold on to something or complete something once this period of shutdown began. It is like having your eyes covered, while the mind moves to every meaningless corner, seeking something but not finding it. Let’s dig deeper. I’ve made my mind up in this way so many times, but then I begin to act without knowing where my actions will lead. In this sort of situation even breathing is difficult! I’m fully aware of the sadness, but I can’t get over it. Only when matter and actions are synchronized can any creative work be done.
The meaning of this entry is ambiguous, at least when faced with the reality of this ‘shutdown period’.There was, in fact, no stopping, nor any demand that matter and actions be synchronized. From our daily experiences, we know that language is not the same as an image, and, in fact, they are completely different, so what the artist wrote does not necessarily have any relevance to his paintings. But we aware of the artist’s actual situation and we also know that by the end of the eighties artists were beginning to seek answers in discussions of language, ideas and reality. Li Xianting’s concept of ‘the grand soul’ was extended to artists as the basis of their historic mission, often understood as bringing about a political transformation. For the artists living between 1988 and 1989 without a stable income, the ‘grand soul’ was obviously not a metaphysical concept that could resolve anything. In the summer of 1988, Li Xianting wrote an article in Fine Arts in China entitled, ‘Our Times Await the Fervor of the Grand Soul’ (Shidai qidaizhe da linghun de shengming jiqing). This essay is intrinsically linked to the chaos and restlessness of society at the time, and in it Li Xianting expresses clear opposition to those artists and critics who stress ‘purified language’ (chunhua yuyan). Li wanted to inform those who naïvely endorsed an ideal of stand-alone art that:
The essence of the problem is not whether or not one emphasizes language or the value of art, but what kind of standard is applied in the emphasis and how one grasps the larger picture of developments in contemporary art.[14]
Obviously, people were even more confused by this call to apply standards to the richness of artistic reality. The loss of standards was not only demonstrated in the replacement of styles and methodologies but that could hardly be a fundamental problem if the language and forms of expression used by young Chinese artists were merely borrowings from Western contemporary art and so lay outside the natural logic of the development of traditional Chinese art. And so the following questions emerged: Just what is contemporary Chinese art? What is the evidence for its legitimacy? The debate initiated in 1987 reflected artists’ internal differences. Some thought that the New Wave art movement was characterized by a crude use of language and that, once ‘the soul’ had left the language, the art was often difficult to understand, leaving artists distanced from social and cultural realities and needing to rely solely on the exploration of ‘language’ to eliminate the wandering of the increasingly suspect ‘soul’. The idea that art must immediately be viewed from the perspective of artistic development was an attitude that can be easily associated with Wang Guangyi’s ideas in 1988. In that year, Wang Guangyi, in a letter to his student Hong Zaixin from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, borrowed the technical term ‘cultural revisionism’ from E.H. Gombrich to point out the meaninglessness of ‘unique creativity’ (duchuang). Sensible artists gradually agreed with this view and some had already begun to experiment with eliminating ‘unique creativity’ and its corresponding characteristics in the ‘soul’. The work titled Analysis(Jiexi) by Wang Luyan, Gu Dexin and others exemplifies the evolution in art that discarded the notion of the ‘grand soul’. In his diary entry for 25 December 1989 Song Yonghong also wrote:
Without an in-depth understanding and assimilation of an entire culture, it’s impossible to produce a great revolutionary movement. The entire culture must also be globally understood, but if the situation in China is roughly introduced then it can’t arouse any great excitement. Currently, rationality is a type of arrogance, but being clear-headed might not necessarily be the best thing,because so little of the development in this period is understood. I still think I should completely get rid of the negative elements that prevent me from expressing my subjective emotions. Taking cues from the surrounding environment to stir up the viewer has recently become characteristic of the work of artists, but to conduct an excavation using materials also reveals the stimulus of our environment. From what I see, this could be the starting point for a tremendous process, and I might get interested in examining the value of this issue from some new higher perspective. To sum up, I should experiment with my own feelings, treating them just as though they are those of other people. I detest the use of materials as a medium for venting rage, and transforming a painting into an already formulated concept in which the spirit is weak and empty.What a horrible situation.
The disagreements in the art world and the conflicts in Song Yonghong’s own ideas about art are clear from this passage. The conflicts shaped the artist’s own emotional and conceptual structure and enabled him to complete highly original works. An intellectual return to the fundamental importance of culture or art history was representative of contemporary art in this period, and Wang Guangyi is an example worth analyzing. Wang Guangyi claimed: ‘No cultural images are absolutely authoritative. We can analyze them from a critical perspective and then revise these cultural facts; it is this revision that validates the meaning of my existence’. Wang’s cultural revisionism was the concept most focused on by artists and critics who either praised or attacked him. However, Wang Guangyi’s own artistic path was fraught with anxiety and danger, because many artists are of the opinion that once creativity is guided by concepts, the art can end only in disaster. Wang Guangyi was soon imposing ‘grids’ on images of the past. Song Yonghong’s temperament precluded him from attempting ‘cultural revision’ of this type. For Song, expression remained his psychological tendency and the primary feature of his paintings, but once he had discovered an idea that would be later labeled ‘post-modern’, he could not ignore it. In reality, Song’s stance was one of rationalism, the idea that we must express any new idea on the basis of already proven facts. This was the reason why rage and capriciousness are both absent from Song Yonghong’s works.
Song Yonghong instinctively refused to play with concepts, insisting that he did not like ‘turning a painting into an already formulated concept’. While he provides no theoretical explanation for this instinctive feeling, Song Yonghong had been enthusiastically interested in painting itself since the very beginning. Even though he participated in performance and installation activities in the winter of 1986, and again after 1990, these experiments did not result in the addition of any interesting content. Song claimed instead that these artistic activities left him ‘feeling confused and not knowing what to do’.
In 1991, Beijing Youth Daily curated the New Generation Art Exhibition. This important exhibition in the early nineties brought a group of young artists to the forefront of the art field. In July of the same year, the New Generation Art Exhibition at the China Museum of History was curated by the artist Wang Youshen, and the critics Yin Jinan, Zhou Yan, Fan Di’an and Kong Chang’an. Apart from Wang Youshen who was the art editor at Beijing Youth Daily, the curators were all professors and critics from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The curatorial committee reflected the art-historical content of this exhibition, which was described as possibly the most important exhibition of the past few years, because it brought together the thinking of this era’. Many artists participated in this exhibition, including Wang Hao, Wang Huaxiang, Wang Xuping, Wang Youshen, Wang Hu, Liu Qinghe, Zhou Jirong, Wang Jinsong, Song Yonghong, Zhu Jia, Pang Lei, Yu Hong, Wei Rong, Shen Ling, Chen Shuxia and Zhan Wang. One can imagine that if these artists truly ‘brought together the thinking of this era’, then the event must have been of great significance. In describing the contents of the show and using language that was now very familiar, Professor Zhou Yan of the Central Academy of Fine Arts reminded readers, of ‘the relaxed tone of mockery’ and ‘the unique language’of the artworks on show.[15]The critic Yin Jinan acerbically pointed out:
Right now, among the very rare experimental explanations offered by critics, we mostly find ambiguous or highly personal comments. Some describe the artistic significance of the New Generation artists or Close-Up Art (Jinjuli Yishu) in terms of ‘mockery and self-ridicule’, others simply call it ‘hooligan consciousness’ (popi yishi). Basically, these explanations only offer a broad brush conceptual notion of the spiritual position occupied by the New Generation or Close-Up Art.
Yin Jinan points out the function of the New Generation, using the terms ‘mockery and self-ridicule’, as well as ‘hooliganism’, and these keywords would be used to describe the work of Fang Lijun and Liu Wei, as well as others artists moving in quite different artistic directions.
Song Yonghong contributed five pieces of work to this exhibition. In contrast to most New Generation artists, the images in Song Yonghong’s paintings reflect anxiety and restlessness. Because of his participation in the New Generation Exhibition, moreover, he was also included in the 1993 Post- 89 New Art Exhibition as a Cynical Realist. Song Yonghong’s art thus ironically came to have two distinctively different labels placed on it.[16]
Song Yonghong’s works entered in the New Generation Exhibition were all sketches in brown that were finished in oil.[17] All were completed in 1991, and the style of these paintings reflects the effects of brushwork. The subjects have anxious expressions and the viewer feels he is witnessing a chaotic emotional event that has been suppressed. However, in A Man and a Woman Controlled by Destiny (Bei mingyun zuoyou de yige nanren he yige nüren, 1991), the effect of light on the subjects provides a sense of physicality. At the same time, the intense contrast of light creates a space on the image that makes one feel anxious. The man in the foreground has his eyes wide open, suggesting a confused fear; the cup, books and bottles on the floor add a sculptural effect. The artist has hidden the effects of the brush as much as possible. We can see the same couple in Tranquil Environment (Qingjing huanjing, 1991). The woman is still on the bed, sitting. This arrangement is obviously intentionally symbolic, and is a plot detail related to sex. The method applied was almost the same, with intense lighting and the dark brown flavor constructing an uncomfortable space. The artist was quite familiar with this space and wanted to tell his audience that even though the space makes the viewer uncomfortable, it is still desirable and dramatic. Among the participating artworks, the content reflected in Youth (Nianqingren, 1991) is closer to the theme of boredom. The unstable structure of the image and the sitting figure’s posture keep out the intense light and strengthen the internal instability and anxiety. His environmental portrait titled Bus (Gonggongqiche, 1991) is an imaginary work, because there is clearly something wrong with the vehicle. The woman in front has an odd expression, and we speculate about why she appears emotionally unsettled. The artist planned to depict an intriguing drama on this bus, because one of the woman’s hands is pressed against a handle and her other hand appears to be clenching her purse, suggesting some imminent event. However, the artist is obviously not interested in external events, and his focus is on the psychological incident that is spreading throughout the space. This sort of focus is one of the most popular and effective techniques of expressionism. We can see that the emotional content revealed in Song Yonghong’s works is somewhat different from that of the New Generation, because he retains the psychological narrative while at the same time maintaining the calm attitude of objective expressionism. Liu Chun has recorded Song’s explanation:
I was born in the 1960s, and graduated in the late 1980s, and this made us different from other artists in terms of our age and social background. The end of the Cultural Revolution was the background for the generation of ‘educated youth’ sent down to the countryside and the flood of contemporary Western thought became the background for the ’85New Wave art movement. Our generation of artists was thrown into a society undergoing constant conceptual change, and the idea of saving Chinese culture was nothing more than empty words for us. In both life and art, reality had left us with incidental shattered fragments, and there were virtually no social events or art styles that made a lasting impact on us. Ennui thus became our most realized state of existence. This could be expressed in an outsider’s watchful attitude of apathy and mockery, the revelation of those scenes of languishing in boredom, the depiction of the disgusting yet pretentiously comical aspects from everyday society and revelations about people’s wretched, despicable and ludicrous behavior.[18]
Song Yonghong originally wanted to address the concepts of Cynical Realism,and the critic Li Xianting has, in fact, categorized Song as belonging to that circle. However, Song instinctively adopted a unique stance and did not want to participate in that scene. He paid attention to scattered details, impromptu vignettes and inexplicable poses, and believed these seemingly meaningless events in life were inevitably problematic. Such a method of expression easily suggests an association with the German expressionist Max Beckmann’s maxim that ‘reality is in fact quite unreal and can be only demonstrated through paintings that mix together the reality of the material and the spiritual’.
Song Yonghong had no memories of the Cultural Revolution, only of his family, personal life and his limited living environment. The big issues of ‘humanity’ (renlei), ‘ultimate goals’, ‘the grand soul’ (da linghun) and ‘deliverance’ (chengjiu) that concerned all artists emerging in the 1980s could not appeal to young artists like Song for whom these concepts lay outside their personal experiences. His environment and educational background affected his perspective on reality and his uniqueness is apparent in his artistic style, form and language. Song Yonghong, like all the so-called New Generation artists, painted only images of daily life and the feelings these occasioned, but it is in his feelings that we see his divergence.
In 1992, Song Yonghong continued to base his oil paintings on sketches, a practice he had begun in 1991, and he has described how he technically moved from the techniques of print making to oil painting. In 1991 he wrote:
Every method of artistic expression has its own technical interpretation, and bringing techniques into the ideal framework of expression is necessary as the last preparatory step before completing an art piece.
It is of course also possible to treat the completion of an artwork as a process, as a developed, developing or imagined entity, allowing it to emerge and vanish spontaneously. Appropriate techniques provide the catalyst for the growth of the painting. It is absolutely necessary to bring the understanding of a particular technical language closer to the actual artistic action.
As a result, works completed in that year were almost all brown in tone and they utilized discrete brushstrokes that left no trace. The basic effect was the distinct separation of black and white spaces, with few mid-range gradations of color, which was also a technical experiment of sorts. His paintings titled T-Junction (Dingzi lukou, 1992), Adolescence (Qingchunqi, 1992) and Old Couple (Laonian fuqi, 1992) are products of this experimental period, and when entered in the Guangzhou Biennale, the latter made a deep impression on critics there. When Peng De summarized the trends in the art at the Biennale, he categorized Song Yonghong as an emerging artist with ‘a new realist style following the success of Liu Xiaodong who has borrowed from Lucian Freud’s style to depict the image and life of contemporary Chinese youth’. The listed artists indeed show that a new artistic phenomenon was taking place: Yu Hong, Zhao Bandi, Li Tianyuan, Wang Jianwei, Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, Wang Jinsong, Song Yonghong and Song Yongping. Most interestingly, even the words of the critics reveal the transitional experimentation undertaken by artists from this period. For example, the critic Yan Shanchun described them as ‘solid and scrupulous in their structural abilities’, while Shao Hong wrote that they had ‘great abilities of expression’. Both these comments precisely describe Song’s own testing of techniques, an area in which his expression was quite outstanding. The critic Zhu Bin pointed to the basic background in the mentality underlying Song Yonghong’s works:
Old Couple portrayed members of a generation that was long sexually oppressed by using coloring on lines to highlight this theme; the numb facial expressions afford viewers entry into an even larger realm of the imagination, endowing the work with distinct social significance.[19]
Sleeping Compartment(Wopu chexiang) and Professional Smile (Zhiye weixiao), both completed in the same year, are almost the same as the above-mentioned works in terms of technique, but in these two pieces the artist has achieved a clear control over his observations of daily life, as well as capturing people’s ennui in that period. His sharp observations and expression turned ‘boredom’ into something enjoyable to observe.
3. Art and Issues
Even though Song Yonghong had sold paintings before 1990, his financial situation was not dependable, and for the most part, his working conditions remarked difficult. His friend Liu Chun has described those times:
In April 1993, I curated and organized Village Planning: 1993 (Xiangcun jihua, 1993) with a few other artists. This event took place on the outskirts of Lüliang, Shanxi province. Song Yonghong, having grown up beside the Fen River and drunk from its waters, had never forgotten his hometown and its group of struggling artists. In order to publicize Village Planning: 1993, he brought people such as Li Xianting, the well-known art critic, and Zhang Yabin, the art director of the 1993 China Oil Painting Biennale, to an old temple in the Lüliang area from Beijing, over 900 kilometers away. The living conditions were extremely crude, and we were drinking boiled rainwater, smoking low-grade cigarettes and eating boxed lunches. That night everyone sat around a dim candle, listening to the wind roaring outside and talked long into the night. The next morning, Song Yonghong left quietly with Li Xianting and the others in the cold wind, watching them get on the bus. I felt sad.[20]
Song Yonghong’s friend Liu Chun’s recollection helps us to imagine the situation of artists during that period, but in 1993, brighter colors appeared in Song’s images, in sharp contrast with his still difficult living conditions.
The bright colors were the result of nearly two years of experimentation in oil painting, and some works were almost pure color. For example, in Spring Sunshine (Chuntian de yangguang), finished in that year, flowers bloom in the green grass, and there are joyous smiles and happy faces in this spring scene. However, closer scrutiny of the subjects in this work prompts us to ask: How does an almost entirely naked and odd-looking man come to be associated with the normal connotations of spring?
Song Yonghong had begun narrating the stories of colors, and in the few years that followed, the artist succeeded in freely telling stories of common lives through his use of color. Some of these stories recount incidents from the artist’s own life, others were projections of the author’s psychology, and some were perhaps products of the artist’s memories, but regardless of their source, whenever a detail or scene became interesting to Song Yonghong it immediately provided the content for one of his colorful stories.
City Scenes (Dushi fengjing, 1993) captures the moment when a young rookie shoots a basketball at the goal, but we do not cheer for his success, because the young man runs the risk of falling into a drainage pit, an outcome hinted at by the ball plummeting through the basket. A basketball court should never have such dangerous things around it, but who can guarantee that a work unit or institution in its dying days won’t place dangerous objects in places with no concern for safety. Song had a keen eye for illogical details, broken backboards, rusty stands, ill-positioned lights and poorly maintained walls and buildings. It is very difficult to capture the absurdity of this type of scene using emotive expression achieved with strong brushwork, much less use realist methods. In works on this theme, psychological reality is the most important consideration, and a subjective point of view obtained by respecting the emotions. We may feel disquiet, or even anxiety, but we still should be able to calmly observe the actual situation. We feel that the reality of this world is a solid comprehensible space in which only the buildings, objects or people change form. However, Song sensed that reality surpasses the physicality of this world, and that life is not as richly imbued with either logic or comprehensible principles as many people suppose. True reality is fraught with danger and constitutes an ambience not amenable to fine-tuning. Song retained a finely honed surrealist attitude in order to prevent his works from becoming over-dramatic and thus jeopardizing the accurate revelation of their psychology.
The scene in Nurse’s Office (Yiwushi, 1993) is similarly disconcerting. The viewers see what appears to be a normal nurse’s duty office, but the people and details in the room make us feel as though we are about to succumb to some sudden illness. The nurse in the inner room is giving someone a shot, and the doctor and patient in the front room are riveted by an inexplicably hurled vase in full flight. The event is not a regular occurrence in any hospital, but the artist has created a startling and absurd drama in a location that should be characterized by tranquility and care. We do not know whether this incident has sprung from the artist’s own experience, but the painting clearly documents an event in the artist’s inner self. The splatters of blood and the flying tissues create a sense of fear, and the artist enhances this psychological state with a well-defined perspective structure. In its mode of expression, Song Yonghong interestingly combines traditional realist techniques with an expressionist style, suggesting an understanding of early Western expressionism through its use of a fragmented reality that accesses issues and absurdity through seeable and concrete objects. As Franz Marc stated, in pursuing quality in art, it is through the attention to the disquieting surface appearance with the pink glow of skin, the shiny nails and the sexual content that one can get to the heart of the question.
The scene in By the Swimming Pool(Zai yongchi bian, 1994) is sexual, but the artist persists in setting up a crucial narrative point, a finger about to untie a bra. The young man pouring water is waiting apprehensively for that moment to come and his psychological state is clearly depicted in his quizzical expression. The dense canopy of leaves and the pitiful trickle of water coming from the jug allude to something sexual; the reflections in the swimming pool of the abrupt red wall in the distance provide a similarly intense perspective and push the inherent tension of this scene to its limit.
The main theme in Beijing Hutong (Beijing hutong, 1994) is similarly sexual. Eyes from different directions of males with different social identities are trained on the woman with a carefree disposition and inviting pose at the center of the composition, and even the vendor with his back to the woman seems to have a strange expression, almost as though he can imagine everything that is happening behind him. The painting establishes a rapport between the money in the vendor’s hand and the socks that the woman has taken off. The scattered garbage and the trashcan are almost allusions and the entire scene symbolizes both the liveliness and boredom of life. Song Yongzhong’s works clearly make ample use of symbolism, allusion and other rhetorical images. If we scan Song’s life on a daily basis, we can glean some relatively constant visual symbols that facilitate our pictorial analysis.
In this period, there are no works that express sexuality as directly as Moat of the Forbidden City (Gugong huchenghe). The Forbidden City, the moonlit night, the moat and the couple having sex are all major elements boldly set together in one place, and their coexistence immediately makes us think of secret histories or strange morals. We may not be able to discern the actual story, but are urged to ponder issues and analyze their significance. Interestingly, it appears that the young man’s reactions donot correspond to the emotions displayed by the woman, and this asymmetrical content intensifies the unhealthy and nasty ambiance of prurience that shrouds the painting. People’s vision is often unclear at night, but the artist clearly reveals content that is explicitly sexual. Is this intended as a warning about a startling reality, or is it a naturalistic description of a natural phenomenon lacking in lyricism that is intended to hint at a real psychological state?
The content of Inside (Shinei, 1994) is quite obvious. If we associate this piece with a work of two years previously which featured the same composition showing a man and woman together in a confined space, then we could say that the artist is only repeating the theme of male-female relationships. However, in this colorful composition, the symbolic theme of the woman is exhausted and the pose of the seemingly impotent young man also seems to have made her lose interest. Although other everyday events are going on in the outside world, what is their relationship to what is happening in this confined space? The artist is still continuously recording his own life, or those that he witnesses.
In all his works sex is an underlying theme. Song Yonghong is especially interested in this topic, and in this he resembles the early twentieth-century expressionists who maintained a long-term interest in the subject of sex, but his understanding of sex is not that of the pleasurable ‘Arabic’ style of the Orientalists. Rather than being for the purposes of providing erotic pleasure, sex in Song’s works usually relates to lifestyles, questions of lifeand the meaning of life itself. One thing that is certain is that Song’s early school education and exposure to literature focused his interest in sex, only now it is being expressed effectively.
In a conversation with Tang Xin, Song recalled that there was a set of published translations called Into the Future Series (Zouxiang Weilai congshu) that included the short dramas by Friedrich Nietzsche and the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Even though he didnot grasp everything, there were passages that moved him and made them feel through their reasoning that life should be lived in a certain way. Freud claimed that sexual desires can be traced back to infancy, breast-feeding and the anal period. To Song this seemed intuitive, because everyone has already experienced periods of childhood and adolescence characterized by sexual haziness. Parents never tell you how to feel after reading these books, but the masters included in this series of books succinctly but explicitly told you that the reader is how people think, or how since the beginning of civilization people underwent this type of emotional change. Song said that the knowledge people acquired from these books at that time is important and real, and the long-term influence of these masters denotes their genuine contribution to society.[21]
In the 1990s there was no longer any need for artists to be defensive about changes in style, and the language of expressionism, for example, could be legitimately considered to be just one stage in the development of artistic forms. The issues that now concerned artists were under what circumstances, to what degree and from which standpoint these familiar artistic languages could be regarded as having value and whether methods of portrayal habitually used by an artist could become a suitable point of expression. The concept of subjectivity was no longer an issue, and young people from the eighties were well read in Western literature and modern art books. The question devolved upon a unique artist’s own language. In this period, Political Pop became the mainstream, influencing young artists and playing the role of representing contemporary Chinese art in the international community. Even though elements in Song Yonghong’s works are closer to ‘hooligan realism’ (popi xianshizhuyi), his life as well as his interests were one with the pop art stream, but standard ideological symbols appeared in works by artists like Fang Lijun, whereas Song Yonghong’s works only had some of the characteristics of Cynical Realism. This reveals that Song was searching for his own path between Political Pop and Cynical Realism.
A note recorded in November 1994 reveals Song’s experimental psychological process:
The most obvious question is why do I paint in this way? I think this is an important question, and many answers can be offered: My work exists between acceptance and creativity, between Eastern and Western culture, between habits and methodologies, between background and experience, and between reality and ambiguity. I feel my work is directly related to the many things I’ve seen and thought about. After all, it’s a cultural activity and it’s hard to imagine things in the absence of interaction. In the end I think we have no choice but to work while continuing to observe and reflect on things.
Experience is a process, and an artist is like an ‘alert dog’ always searching for something, but maybe only he knows what that is, if he is really alert. The methods for resolving creative perplexity follow no rules and are extremely varied. Sometimes recollection is necessary for acquiring a new understanding, which he described in 1990 as ‘carefully studying technical issues of the earlier masters of a given period’. Perhaps he found a form of ‘fantastic beauty’ he could put to use in Edgar Degas’ sketches, and a coherent myth became his artistic belief and motivation at this time. Song believed adamantly that the spiritual self could be blended into the material surface of the painting or, at least, that painting was a combination of the material body and the spiritual realm, a combination of continuous progress and spiritual reality. In the same way in which Song studied and researched Western art history, he adopted a methodology of searching for the inner sources, because, as he wrote in 1990, ‘a humanistic work of art deeply affects the innerself of humanity, causing the artwork and the artist to create a physical reaction in which every block of color, every type of composition, and every touch on the canvas seems to bring shivers and touch one’s soul in an undiminished moment of enlightenment!’
However, Song Yonghong also believed that the soul had its own unique character and every artist should avoid the expressions of the soul of other artists. After an artist has participated intensively in a feverish movement in art, he or she can succumb to a loss of sensitivity and observational powers. Therefore, he commented in 1991 that, after participating in 1989 in China Avant-Garde, billed as China's first contemporary art exhibition, ‘there was this sense of being untouched, or of simply being an observer. Of course, simply denying the obvious effect of that event would be laughably smug. By further focusing on reality, I discovered points of sensitivity in my inner self. I finally found my own mode of expression and was alerted to my own prejudiced explanation of reality’. The ‘sense of being untouched’ (bujieru gan) is an instinctive distancing that was a common characteristic of this era. Song Yonghong expressed this feeling, which revolved around the dilemma of whether to continue to evade collective action.
In his attitude to reality, Song Yonghong has demonstrated an analytical reliability. He was not willing to believe that the soul can stand alone, like those abstract artists who believed in the unique form of the soul, but perhaps reality is only a factor of stimulus and once our inner self is aroused, something other than the material can provide the inspiration for painting or, at least, the real objects can become disembodied and reassembled. In this way the stance of materialism can be not only discarded, but the metaphysics of modernism are also avoided, thereby creating another unique reality. In 1991 Song Yonghong wrote: ‘The targets on which I focus are what interest me in my own environment. Transcending rational self-serving habits is truly exciting, and my living environment provides me with the basic elements for creativity with which I can blend my imagination into my painting and then select the most credible emotional details. I don’t believe that ready-made concepts can resolve issues of inspiration for artists. I only trust intuition’.
The spiritual marrow of expressionism comprises a constant change in the direction of the artist’s searching, but once the artist finds the object closest to him that he has wanted to find, he will go forward in the belief that the unknown is more real. Franz Kafka said of madness, ‘there is a goal, but no way; what we call a way is hesitation’. Song Yonghong described a similar state in 1991 when he wrote: ‘Dissolving certain inner feelings, breaking up paint in my hands and dabbing at some satisfying shapes have provided me with satisfaction. Art is not a release of bottled-up emotions, but the precise handling of many elements. We often think we need to find a point of communication when expressing ourselves, but then we inevitably doubt our actions. Art always develops in the face of countless possibilities, which in itself is an incomplete and unbalanced historical process’.
Song Yonghong’s constant experimentation continued until 1993, as he constantly altered his methods that can be seen as making new moves on a basis he acknowledged. In 1993, after the end of the Guangzhou Biennale, artists began to see new possibilities: intuitions, feelings and ideas that were once relished or even regarded as sacred were now increasingly challenged. In Song Yonghong’s writings, we now see terms such as ‘operations’ (caozuo) and ‘planning’ (cehua) make their appearance. While believing that the foundation of Western modernism could be found in Christian culture, Song Yonghong noticed among contemporary Chinese artists a phenomenon transcending Nietzsche’s sense of tragedy. Artists were shifting away from the basic philosophies of Western modernism in the 1980s, and ‘directly applying some of the regulations governing the activities of Western modernist schools’. To a large extent, Song Yonghong began to be on his guard against the rapidly emerging market economy and its influence on the art world that had begun in the second half of 1992. The issue was becoming complicated because the 1992 Guangzhou Biennale and the following year’s Post-89 New Art exhibition led artists to focus on a different order of question: Under what premise can ideas and sensitivities be regard as existing? As a social product, does art’s only way to realize value lie in the inner self or in appreciation? Who is appreciating works of art? Who is legitimizing art? In that year many artists and critics were adding new terms to their modernist lexicons, and it was impossible for Song Yonghong to avoid this context, best described by Wang Guangyi:
I believe money and art are both good. Mankind worked for thousands of years to discover the joy and contentment art and money can bring. Artists and ordinary people are very much alike; they both love money, but the difference is that ordinary people use money to live a luxurious life, and artists use it to preserve a mythological image: The more charming the myth, the more valuable his or her works become. There is a law whereby metaphysical myth turns into secular myth at work in this process, and these two processes have reciprocal relationships that advance the process of art. We could say that this is the thesis and antithesis phenomenon or the Matthew effect that determines the birth and extinction of myth for artists, critics and the art market.
Wang Guangyi’s description is intelligible and convincing, beginning with his call in 1988 to ‘clean away humanistic enthusiasm’, whereby he predicted an important reality shift. However, many artists questioned whether the fundamental questions of art really related to money. In Wang Guangyi’s opinion, art and money are related and are different aspects of cultural issues.
Huang Zhuan had this to say about the market:
For a long time, our art history invented many myths of how the greatness of an artist was formed by a naturally eccentric personality, but revealed little of how each artist’s path to fame entailed many real and complex incidents. Artists are surrounded by various political and religious powers, interest groups, art managers, art dealers, buyers, collectors and critics, all of whom have a mysterious and unpredictable effect on the progress of their works.
Lü Peng was more optimistic:
The marketization of art in the end allows an effective and full demonstration of the spiritual world. In a commercial society, evaluating these in terms of money is the most effective way. Once all academic disputes become insoluble without the judgments of God, then the most effective decision maker is money.
It was in this period that critics became self-confident, after more than three years in a depressed spiritual climate, and so they hoped to promote the progress and development of contemporary art through the medium of the market. In terms of their work, they were faced with a double paradox: on the one hand, the inner world of the artist should not be questioned as the premise of art; on the other hand, under what circumstances can the legitimacy and truth of art be proven? In other words, through what channels can the artist’s representation of his understanding be shared with others? In terms of evaluation, who can determine the reality and legitimacy of the inner self? A series of questions were asked concerning art, art production and art values, and the title academics chose for the Guangzhou Biennale, ‘Ideals and Operations’ (Lixiang yu caozuo), revealed the critics’ intentions. Terms such as ‘operations’ and ‘efficacy’ were used constantly, and the impression that questions related to the spirit of art and the artist’s world of emotions were being temporarily setting aside resulted in misunderstanding and dissatisfaction. People again began to ask the perennial question: What is art?
It was under these circumstances that Song Yonghong in 1993 raised doubts in his examination of the application of rules in Western contemporary schools and the effects produced:
These methods are, without doubt, eye-opening in their given historical contexts, but they did not solve any actual issues. Invention and a sense of planning are basic methods of operating, and these operations have both an intuitive sense and an attitude of cultural application, which is often more lofty in its ideals than the actual management of reality and is an invention of limited historical effect. This year when we went down to the countryside, we were still satisfied with observations, observing all kinds of things and feeling all sort of emotions. Perhaps the most important thing is to discover what is ‘functional’ in culture. ‘Operations’ and ‘applications’ are infirm concepts and unhealthy psychological reactions, or perhaps society and culture are just not simple filters. What is important is complete and penetrating real experience.
Song Yonghong was clearly not interested in the artists and critics who were incessantly using the term ‘operations’ or, at least, he did not agree with the view that sees the inner value of art and its influence as one entity. He insisted on the importance of intuition and feelings, without paying much attention to the outcome following a work’s completion, unless it is complimented for its emotional effects. The artist continued to ponder his own artistic language and was not easily influenced by the artistic forms that had proven effective. He repeatedly thought about the inseparable relationship established between the issues of concept and language, as he wrote in 1993: ‘Any overt focus on one’s personal language can be rather dangerous, and I think there will never be issues with a language becoming unfashionable. From another perspective, language is only a method or tool. What’s important is the way of thinking, an improvement in ideology, one’s perspective on an issue or one’s choice of perspectives’.
In 1995, Song Yonghong had already noticed that ‘many burning intuitive realities’ were now emerging from his brush. He had completely shifted his focus to society and stepped out of his personal space, and was no longer even able to bear his everyday life.
Scorching Reality (Zhuore de xianshi, 1995) is another scene set in the hospital, but this time the artist frankly opens up the question of privacy, hoping to remind people’s sense of shame is not be respected simply because they happen to be in an environment such as a hospital. This seemingly logical scene, through the artist’s overt indifference, loses its logicality. The ‘scorching’ passion of the painting’s title originates in the indifference towards personal privacy. In another nurse’s office, depicted in his work titled Quiet (Jing, 1995), the briefing on rules and the exposed breast of the stripped patient construct an even more poignantly ‘scorching reality’.
Scorching Reality: Conveyor System (Zhuore de xianshi: Liushui zuoye, 1995) instead creates a ‘scorching’ ambiance, merely intensifying the psychological heat. The chickens and their disgorging guts readily rouse our uncertainty about life’s predicament, regardless of the artist’s intention. While the audience does not see the real scorching moment, they, together with the chickens, experience an anxiety about this version of a ‘scorching reality’.
Scorching Reality: Cleansing (Zhuore de xianshi: Xidi, 1995) stresses the details of the disgusting green foam coming from the subject’s body, and in this painting the artist uses hidden symbolism to warn the audience to pay attention to the suffering environment from which we cannot escape.
Even though the diptych landscapes from Scorching Reality(1995) provide us with a clear blue sky, the roles played by the subjects and the scene management of the images takes us by surprise. The life and objects in every part of the work have an objective existence, but in this strange composition the seemingly irrelevant details build into a psychological question. Song categorized this type of question as another scorching reality.
The triptych Dentistry: Reshaping (Yake: Zhengxing, 1995) reveals seemingly absurd and ridiculous scenes of tooth extraction and the replacement with false teeth in a dental hospital. The artist plays on the many meanings of ‘extraction’ and ‘insertion’, and the orderly row of recumbent patients symbolizes a problem in life that is no longer personal. There is a humorous element, but this humor is tainted with memories of pain.
In all these works, we can detect a feeling common to all other works by Cynical Realist artists, such as boredom, ridicule, distancing and cynicism, but the active prying, revelation and tension in Song Yonghong’s paintings are closer to expressionism. In his spiritual content, Song Yonghong retained his basic standpoint, which he described as his ‘non-interventionist stance’ (bujieru de lichang). Song Yonghong is especially sensitive to what he has experienced and observed for himself, and the degrading life situations he has also been exposed in society have produced images of the strange and bizarre through the filter of the artist’s sharp imagination. His compositions and arrangements of images are a special talent and, just when a concept approaches its limits it succeeds in releasing a pyrotechnical display. Up until 1996, Song Yonghong continued to paint using this type of expression, even though he considered works completed in 1996 as lacking any new input. This continued until he sensed the necessity for change. The artist later recalled:
In the period from 1993 to1995, I had finished doing this thing and I had had my fill of it. It would have been boring to continue. After my solo exhibition in Hong Kong in particular, I began to have self-doubts. I felt my works had a strong regional sense and were limited, soI lost interest and realized I wanted to express art, not something ideological.[22]
Although Song Yonghong instinctively and consciously wished to avoid ‘ideological’ works, even if such content did exist, it would have been inevitable, and if his works were ‘regional’ this would also come as no surprise. Not getting involved in artistic trends does not constitute an escape from reality and his expressionist works retain an ethical standard to which many people were unaccustomed. This only changed when Song Yonghong finally left the Beijing Arts and Crafts College with a stable income, and became a professional artist. This gave him increased freedom, but brought him new problems.
Song Yonghong has never been quiet and obedient and, like other young artists, detests rules and regulations, acting if possible according to his feelings. He finds life irresistible and so embraces reality rather than escape, and this has become the hallmark ofhis art. As we have seen, symbols and allusions have always appeared in Song Yonghong’s paintings to different degrees and,even in works completed from 1997 to 1998, Song Yonghong maintained his original stance, not wanting to merely articulate, but to express an attitude or a standpoint. As demonstrated by his continuing output of work, includingRainbow (Caihong, 1996), Two Brothers Exhibition (Xiongdi erren zhan, 1996), Green Jeep (Lüse jipu, 1997), Grand Sale (Da shuaimai, 1997) and Hong Kong (Xianggang, 1997), an attitude of ‘revelation’ is concealed beneath the surface of indifference. In the latter half of the 1990s, post-modernism was flourishing in the academic and art worlds and dualism was considered dead. The idea developed that all phenomena had their fundamental rationale and that therefore one should offer cynical critique without a standpoint, but this only left room for strategies. This was mere existence. However, Song Yonghong provided a rare antithesis to post-modernism by glorifying his own stance and preparing to respond to every possible phenomenon, by moving his bodily strategies into the spiritual realm. His inner disquiet and his veneration for the abstract notion of art made him a vigilant loner even in the most difficult times, as well as being a serious observer even in the midst of laughter. [23]
If Song stressed the imagination and adopted a non-experiential stance, which he described for example in 1996 as ‘the use of hypotheses, analogies, a cultural potpourri, self-confessed ennui, speculation and excessiveness’, this was only a comparison and re-organization of the past he had experienced and felt. For example, after his solo exhibition at theHanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong, he recalled displaying his Hong Kong Series of Paintings (Xianggang zuhua) completed after that event in 1996, and a new ambience appears in his images. The artist was still gathering together impressions from his past or even including those details which he could not shake off into the new images, but any interesting new elements he now found he would bring into his images without hesitation, and he noted that even ‘fragrance’ became a theme in his art in 1996. He never entertained the idea of getting away from this reality to some unknown world. In 1996 he wrote:
For many years, I constantly wanted to escape from the oppression of particular situations, in the attempt to feel as relaxed as possible, but I realized that this intention was more or less a dream, because any form of escape would imply losing control of reality. Any reality is made up of real things, which all function and progress in their own unique ways, and so the weakness of art and artists is quite obvious.
Song Yonghong had no intention of departing from this grand era, but he always found himself between different groups, rather than advancing as a participant in one particular group.
4. Bathingas Spiritual Consolation
In his biography his friend Liu Chun records Song's account of the next stage in his career:
In November 1999, I moved my studio from Mao’erHutong to Huajiadi, and that’s when I met Zhang Xiaogang, the artist from Sichuan. Zhang is representative of the '85 New Wave and wasthen already established. We often chatted together. He’s a nice guy andour conversations influenced me greatly and were often inspiring. Zhang Xiaogang once asked me, ‘Can’t you just paint one thing? Why do you have to paint so much at once?’ That really woke me up.In my personal development, the past has been quite messy. There was too much I wanted to say, and in the end I didn’t know any longer what I wanted to say. It was quite tiresome. Then I found the theme of showering. Among my recent works, every piece is independent, and the impressions are different when you face each work. With me, there’s nothing formulaic. What I want to express is that life is beautiful and we can find comfort in this beauty. For instance, I paint works about bathing and showering, which is a very common event in our daily lives. As well as being very comforting, every individual experience of showering is different. In my own opinion, cynicism is seeing something from the outside, it’s emotionalized and direct, but my current works are abstract. I want to distance myself from reality and createan unfamiliar sensation.[24]
After Song Yonghongarrivedin Huajiadi, he moved into a convivial environment where for the resident artists from south-western China, who had first met up in the 1980s, mutual interaction, concern and exchanges were the norm. This was something that had been rare for Song Yonghong in his previous seven years of teaching. His new neighbors included Zhang Xiaogang, Chen Wenbo, Feng Zhengjie and Ren Xiaolin, who had retained their tradition of frequently gathering together as a group from their early days in the southwest. This facilitated the exchange of views about art or life in general, and it provided each artist with new ideas and feelings. The atmosphere evoked the lifestyle of artists in Parisin the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even back in Chengdu or Kunming, no one would start a heated argument because someone’s unique life experiences, opinions on art or even worldviews, and personal discontentment would often vanish as time passed. This harmonious ambiance characteristic of the Southwestern artists began to influence the unruly and unsettled Song Yonghong and change his ideas about living and studying independently in the course of the intense conversations he took part in at Huajiadi. In his reminiscences about this period, Song describes his fond memories of the environment:
The most direct influence that caused my work to shift direction came from Zhang Xiaogang. As an artist from the early eighties who had left a deep impression with his expressionist style, Zhang Xiaogang was widely known by the early nineties and had gained international influence through the exhibition Post-89 New Art. In the mid-nineties, Zhang Xiaogang’s works became one of the three most important symbols of contemporary Chinese art. The other two are Wang Guangyi and Fang Lijun. The stable image systems of these three painters provided the most convincing sources for analyzing Chinese politics, society and ideology in the nineties.[25]
As a famous and important artist, Zhang’s opinions encouraged Song Yonghong to rearrange what had put into his canvases over previous years. For an artist sensitive to reality and society, the endlessly emerging new ideas and information posed difficult questions concerning how much of life’s contents were actually worth representing and accepting. In other words, how best to reveal the unique characteristics of an artist’s art? Quite early in his career, Song Yonghong had shown a lack of interest in expressing ‘ideology’, and he believed instead in the importance of his own sensitive intuition. It was this desire to search for something different that led Song Yonghong to avoid the simple political attitude of the early Stars Art Group and the collectivism of the '85 New Wave, as well as to distance himself from the Cynical Realists’ ideology of inevitability, often criticized by critics as the ideology of ‘doggish Confucianism’. [26] However, the crux of his dilemma was maintaining a personalized and unique artistic image. Zhang Xiaogang’s art became a model for many young artists, although they were not duplicating or following Zhang’s pictorial style but learning how an artist can discover a path rich in analytical meaning.
At a time when the more colorful storms of modern Chinese art history and overtly rational formalism had become things of the past, and expressionism’s concern for liveliness and verisimilitude had also ceased to be important, every artist wanted to find a solid foundation for their own images. Zhang Xiaogang’s simplified style and appropriate methods allowed a symbolic historical story to be both clean and clear. It was difficult for viewers to forget the historical criticism that was constructed with such images, and these images thus evoked a shared memory. Such examples extensively influenced Song Yonghong, until one day Zhang Xiaogang told him: ‘You should rearrange your material’.
Zhang Xiaogang’s advice was, in fact, only a suggestion, but for Song it provided a moment of ‘enlightenment’ when he looked back on his past work and suddenly discovered various things that had obstructed him and presented him with problems. He had already begun ‘rearranging’ his work before his move to Huajiadi even though, to begin with, this work was sensitive and unstable, but if we compare the paintings Song completed in 1998 with those done in 1997, the distinctions are quite apparent.
The themes treated in that year were still situations we are familiar with and they were wide-ranging, such as:‘love at night’, in Dusk (Huanghun), Night Scene (Yese), and Lovers (Qingren); memories and experiences, in Hometown (Guxiang), Riverside View (Hebian fengjing) and Factory (Gongchang); and symbols and allusions drawn from life, in Diving (Tiaoshui) and Courtyard Sculpture (You diaoxiang de yuanzi). However, in dealing with these themes, the artist began to cover up his ‘over-heated’ brushwork and minimize the anxiety evident on the canvas. The images began to settle down and he used his techniques rationally. Song was still attracted to interesting details and meanings, but this was an experimental period, and he constantly reconsidered the question of whether understanding the essential nature of a subject could only be completed using an irrepressible expressionism. He maintained his unique perspective although, at the time, this was something he wanted to come to grips with, and the solution would prove unique. Song Yonghong realized that constantly trying to catch the changes in reality was unending and that change itself is the basis for the existence of art. But what content was required for art to change? In the same way, recording emotional reality was also unending because emotional reality comes from social life. Song Yonghong found that, as an artist whose images reveal a unique perspective, it might be necessary for him to discard the things he most cherished - the constantly changing content, the richness of color and the excited brushstrokes. The artist had to actualize his goals, even though they might be hidden in an unknown world. Among all the works produced in 1998, Bathtub Lovers (Yugang qinglü) was probably the most simple. In comparison to Loversin which Song used ocean-like water to blur the background, in Bathtub Lovers the trees are still visible, though brushed over and summarized,and the image retains a poetic sensibility. Even in 1999, Song Yonghong was still bogged down by his hesitant experiments with symbols, in Flowers of Evil (Hua zhi e), with stories, in Light (Guang) and, with allusions, in Landscape (Fengjing). But all these works express a tendency to tranquility and simplicity. In his work of 1999 titled Landscape, the subject has gone, leaving behind only a shadow; the basketball court is empty and the silent night makes this world seem calm and innocent, revealing that a simplified and innocent ideal has begun to take hold. However, different themes once again conceal the emerging rationality and analytical light. His work continued in this experimental way until he became a communal hotpot-eating member of the group of artists living in Huajiadi. Zhang Xiaogang asked him:
If you must take a particular direction, what do you want to paint? Because so many things can be painted from life, you have to paint something that other people will remember you by, or something that can be summed up in a word like ‘showering’.
Showering is interesting. People have different identities, but once they are naked they are essentially the same. No matter what kind of people they are, once their uniform is taken off, they are nothing more than a material body.You should consider minimalism.
Zhang Xiaogang’s words pushed Song Yonghong to work quickly on his Shower(Xizao) series.
The theme of showering had long appeared in Song Yonghong’s works, and two sketches from 1994 treat the subject, which the artist would soon incorporate into a painting. In the 1995 series of Scorching Reality, the image of showering with green foam became the artist’s early expression of this scene of daily life. However the ‘shower’ of this period was only one among many themes originating from life. The artist remained more interested in the energy and changeability of life, and so the theme of showering was only one irrepressible expression of his love of life. This can also be seen in his themes and methods of expression in the 1996 work Public Bathhouse(Gonggong yushi). The nudity and sexual compositions often appear differently in works from different times. We can see a loving man and woman in a bathtub in the series Hong Kong, inspired by materials from his time there. This topic appears again in 1998’s Bathtub Lovers. From these works we see how bathing is a leitmotif that stemmed from experience and life, from an interest in expressing sex and from the special perspective provided by peeping. The vibrant and even obsessive psychological character of this motif provides subconscious proof that Song would later return to the theme of showering. Song is filled with curiosity, but only a unique psychology can repetitively use images or symbols, as we see in Salvador Dali’s work that had an extensive influence on contemporary Chinese artists. But we do not subject these images to more concrete psychoanalysis in our understanding and enjoyment of them.
Song Yonghong settled in Huajiadi towards the Chinese New Year of 2000. After Zhang Xiaogang’s enlightening advice to Song Yonghong, the artist records: ‘I drew my first sketch of showering and felt right about it, and that made me excited. I felt I was good at it and could finally be subjective’. In 2000, Song Yonghong completed many sketches for the Showering (Xizao) series; among these experimental sketches, the artist used watercolor to test the effects of colors and began to decide on the initially simple composition.
The Shower of Comfort (Weiji zhi yu) series was thus born. In this series, completed in 2000, we see rational and simple compositions. The backgrounds are uncluttered, they are monotone in color, and there is a single subject, contrasting dramatically with Song’s earlier colorful, strong and shocking compositions. Not long previously, the artist had still been reluctant to let go of his familiar details, but a serene evening easily roused the artist’s poetic feelings and, in this, we recall Charles Baudelaire or Stéphane Mallarmé, who were such influences on Chinese artists of the eighties, almost a hundred years after their time. Song Yonghong now determinedly discarded what he had held back and began to rationally summarize what had been repeatedly expressed in his past work.
Song Yonghong recalled what he once said when talking about his own personality:
As I recall, I felt I couldn’t do anything else, because I was too instinctive. I am not someone who analyzes things structurally and rationally. I like instinctively revealing what I feel, and so I paint.
I like painting, it’s tangible, and must be done alone. It can ease or smooth away some of my internal pressures. And I must paint to reveal emotional matters. If I didn’t paint, I might have become a crook.[27]
This is quite a revelation about what he instinctively felt was his inner disposition. In the analysis of traditional Chinese culture, one’s nature is something that is largely unalterable and it provides the basis for an individual’s uniqueness, but we notice a change in the artist's personality in the Shower of Comfort series and this perhaps indicates a fundamental shift.
In the same way as we can perceive something of the flavors of René Magritte in Zhang Xiaogang’s art, we can also sense a magical serenity in Song Yonghong’s Shower of Comfort. Large areas of color even out or weaken the realistic and expressive function, and keep color within very limited boundaries, allowing light, if we accept the notion that the shining bodies originate from light, to focus on the body of the subject. Such a method is indeed simple for an artist with a background in print-making, but what alarms the viewer is the water. The water that has no visible source, but is magically dynamic and detailed as it breaks the serenity and simplicity of the compositional space. When water appeared in 1995 (Scorching Reality: Cleansing) and in 1996 (Public Bathhouse), it revealed the artist’s respect for the physical world, but at the time the artist was more interested in the effects produced by the water, whether it was green or pink. Through the expression of these effects the artist’s unique sensibility was revealed. Now the water is more meticulously depicted and such meticulousness does not further clarify the physical characteristics of water, but rather makes the water abstruse, fantastic or even abstract, suggesting the remarkable abstruseness we discover in the shadows of Giorgio de Chirico’s architecture.
Song Yonghong has talked about this:
From the standpoint of realism, the water in my works has become ambiguous. It’s distant from reality, and the physicality of the water has been weakened. In response, its intrinsic meanings are strengthened. Water is no longer water but an idea, which can be played with or used for comfort.[28]
The outcome of this summary of complex elements from the past is to raise his work to a more abstracted and complex level. On the question of whether he had achieved the genuine simplification he sought to express in these chaotic pictorial worlds, Song commented:‘I know I have entered a new period, a new stage, and because of this, I am quite excited’. All his techniques for achieving simplification have now appeared, and now he must simply decide which to choose and which to omit, such as the details related to structure and relationships.
In 1999, Song Yonghong turned thirty-three. Extended pressures and changes in his life, as well as anxieties caused by his parents’ poor health had an affect on the artist’s view of life and his attitude towards it. Adolescence can create impulsiveness, but a complex psychology and real pressures can also change people’s mental outlook. Among Song Yonghong’s memories of the past, his family and childhood, his parents had always been the source of complex and strange influences. However, for an artist whose instincts preserved traditional culture, memories, regret and instinctual love, these would smooth out the impulsive youth and allow his heart to reach deeper. This is the reason for Song Yonghong’s new interest in Zhuangzi and spiritual books after 1999:
Whenever I thought of my parent’s passing away, I felt I was not living truthfully. That is the reason in that period for my extensive reading of religious books, the philosophy of Zhuangzi and the Chinese classics and for talking about the soul. I mostly looked at books about Christianity and Buddhism, though not very deeply. But I was still very interested in religious matters. I realized at the time that when we are pushed to despair no one can rescue us, and only religious beliefs can provide comfort.[29]
As a result, even though the naïveté of his new images might seem to be inspired by other’s advice, this acceptance was also the outcome of a profound psychological change brought about by physical and mental changes, and the slightest hint of a coincidence could stir up the dust of the subconscious and ultimately change a person's view regarding the truth of the images.
There is no other story, detail or situation in Song’s artistic history that has more symbolic meaning than his works treating showering. Chinese before the eighties were quite familiar with equivalents of the concept Weltanschauung as the ‘view of life’ and ‘worldview’, and although Song Yonghong might not have used or thought of these terms at that time, he had certainly thought about the question of his own life. This is also a question that instinctive expressionists can never abandon, just like the symbolic images produced by Mao Xuhui continuously examine problems related to people. Showering is simple, using water to cleanse one’s body, but showering and bathing have a history of their own, and in different historical periods they meant different things. Showering has been associated with epidemic diseases, the anxiety of isolation or the thirst for release, and it has implied the need for vigilance, concealment or even uncontrollable fear. The body’s contact with the outside world through the pores, that is to say the protection offered by the skin, is always relative and,oncethe microbes of the physical world are eliminated or kept at bay, the meaning of showering is limited to the spirit. The artist himself explains:
Showering expresses everything that is introverted, self-pitying, personal, private, self-comforting, escaping, contradictory, lacking direction, repetitive, ambiguous, violent, effeminate, two-dimensional, stubborn, joyful, admirable and tranquil, like a mirror that reflects humanity.[30]
A sharp thinker and intuitive observer, the critic Li Xianting reminded Song Yonghong of the possibility of his drifting into realism, but the artist retained his reliance on figurative images, which ‘have always been a form that I enjoy’, but it required artistic strength to find a channel of expression or a technical solution inorder to create an incredible world of images. On 24 November, 1999, just after moving to Huajiadi, he wrote about these issues:
To clarify, my works are not realism, new realism, nor new figurative art. I use a figurative vocabulary, but the most important thing is the change in feeling and thinking, as well as social and cultural changes. There is no given definition, no concept or any special ideology. The image is only a sentiment.
At the same time, he reminded himself in his writings from mid-December onwards that the strangeness of reality can enchant him and that if at all possible he must maintain his figurative style:
I am enamored of the figurative and I think these images safeguard my understanding of the world, because I have this unknown desolate feeling about the truth that has been lost or is past. I would like time to stop in the moment of the imaginary, so that I can extract a sense of safety from it, a satisfaction. I consider my method or vocabulary to be traditional. I narrate what’s happening and what’s about to happen. My understanding of artistic progress is just like my view of ordinary desire. Every form or vocabulary should have the right to speak.
In terms of basic concepts, this is an objective standpoint, a standpoint that maintains a respectful attitude towards the material world. His zeal for formality and color belongs to the past and to cities from the early twentieth century: Dresden, Munich, Berlin or Vienna, or among the dramatic paintings of European artists. Once the expressionist storm passed, there was liberation of the emotions and a new freedom in behavior. However, for Chinese artists who lived through periods of liberation in thinking in the eighties and were anxious to join the international track in the nineties, their understanding of imagery had become completely personalized. They would not be affected by any minor influences, and what remained most important was the individual's own understanding and sensitivity.
Showering was no longer the story about two people’s carnal pleasure, and the person in the shower, whether male or female, seems to be showering for purification. Song Yonghong places men and women in different compositions, and he attempts to minimize the possible association with material or color shades, even though the voluptuous feminine bodies are eye-catching. However, with the intervention of water, we are easily guided by the artist’s mental inspiration. This type of showering is spiritual comfort, even though such a comforting composition retains sexual symbolism. However, faced with Shower of Comfort we sense anxiety, because the overly detailed depiction of the water or its unusual distribution readily creates a feeling of unsettledness. Perhaps it is this water that maintains the richness and change of Song's artistic past and becomes part of the surrealist realm. Nevertheless, the symbolic nature of water leads us to its different functions and historical uses: the prevention of disease, the cleansing of the body, entertainment and enjoyment, cleansing and healing, sacred and profound. The artist is telling us that this water is material and concrete. However, within the abstruse space, whether this water has volume or not, it is used and interpreted willfully.
Since the artist never denied his love of the figurative and depicts clearly identifiable shapes and objects, we can always perceive various portrayals of his subjective material world in his art. His paintings are thus a type of objective expressionism that also reveals a relativist attitude. Moreover, the artist’s efforts to minimize technical expressions and to render his subjects, water and space abstract mean that we are prevented from further analyzing the images. We simply see characters, backgrounds and utensils painted with monotonous colors. This allows the artist to escape from the narrative and thus conceptualize the image. This also symbolizes Song’s goal, which is to distill the emotional through a portrayal of the actual. At this point, from any perspective, spiritual comfort is important, and, as a form of spiritual consolation,Showering become the artist’s most representative series of works.
Beginning in the year 2000, Song Yonghong also entered the new artistic period in contemporary Chinese art, and his own attitude towards the immense creativity of this period was one of excited enjoyment. It seemed as though ‘the gates of heaven’ had opened up and art had entered a space of even greater freedom. Many years of sentiments were converted into a more detailed new world of the soul. Even though he was intimately connected with this world, it quickly became an independent space that went beyond the material images and raised questions among skeptics. On 5 November, the artist wrote:
The development of the Shower of Comfort made my previous works crucial. I had built up a foundation for my work in the nineties and every element contained a possibility of development. In the year 2000 I became selective, and discoveredthat the shower was an interesting event. In fact from the eighties until the nineties this theme had already appeared in my works, but by choosing this theme now I was better able to represent my current sense of even greater estrangement and conceptuality.
This explanation shows that the Shower of Comfortseries was only one of the many possibilities that had emerged from his past, but only by developing this theme was he able to preserve his great concern for estrangement and conceptuality. If the most essential question has been fully recognized, then another question emerges: Is there any necessity for adding more content or further possibilities? This is the artist’s own response, both to us and to himself. For most audiences perhaps hoping to obtain an ‘aesthetic analysis’, we can only answer that any historical decision should be preceded by an aesthetic judgment, and aesthetic judgments are part of our analysis of historical judgments, but receiving spiritual consolation through a historical judgment is something upon which we can only speculate.
12 March 2005.
NOTES:
[1]Jin Yide, ‘Educational Report from Graduation Artworks’ (Biye chuangzuo jiaoxue de tihui), Fine Arts, no.9, 1985.
[2]Dialogue with Tang Xin(Yu Tang Xin de tanhua).
[3]‘Once Fine Arts in China proposed the idea of groups, my brother in Shanxi formed the Three-Step Studio with two other people. Around the end of Rauschenberg’s exhibition in 1985, they hastily prepared for their first event, to be held in Taiyuan’s SouthPalace. It took them only three to four days to put together an installation, including the chairs and tables all drawn by brush, as well as tires, samples, condoms, flags, prints and oil paintings. They had everything. The first exhibition happened very fast, everyone was excited and didn’t sleep for many days. This was their first event, but I didn’t take part’. From: Dialogue with Tang Xin.
[4]Yunnan Fine Arts Newsletter (Yunnan meishu tongxun), no.3, 1986.
[5]Gao Minglu, Contemporary Chinese Art History: 1985-1986(Zhongguo dangdai meishu shi: 1985-1986), October 1991, p.249.
[6]‘My brother was invited to participate in the Huangshan Conference. He thought my graduation pieces were well done and wanted to bring some slides along, and asked me to join him when I got time. At the time, I had just graduated and was assigned to the Beijing Arts and Crafts Academy; I had no classes, so I went. Once there, I watched slides and videos everyday, including Zhang Peili’s Shattered Glass. I remember that well. They didn’t invite me. I was there to have fun and showed some of my slides. Many people really enjoyed them, and said we were all doing abstract stuff, with some resemblance to primitive totem symbols, and in the prints and sketches there was an underlying emotion that was really interesting, at least it was rare within China at the time, and so it made an impression’. Dialogue with Tang Xin.
[7]On 22 November 1988, an academic preparatory conference for a contemporary art exhibition, attended by more than one hundred artists, critics and editors, was held at the Tunxi Jiangxinzhou Hotel in Huangshan city, Jiangxi province. The organizers were the HefeiArt Academy and the China Art Research Institute’s Fine ArtsDepartment.
[8]Gao Minglu wrote in ‘From Beginning to End’ (Shimo): ‘Apart fromthe weakening influencethat political and economical factors had on art, the turn in direction taken by the ’85 art movement was also a cause. At the conference many artists thought the ’85 art movement should have a new direction, because it was a movement that increased enthusiasm for cultural activities, promoted social ideals (including political ideals) and the new direction should be taken to clean awayhumanistic enthusiasm in cultural activities. The next period in the development of contemporary Chinese art should focus on the elimination of meaning and reach an understanding with an international background. It should be said that this change in direction hinted at the developing trend of the post-June Fourth movement in 1989, which was in a superficial and popular, commercial and global direction’. Gao Minglu realized many years later that at the time almost no critic was able to predict any completely different outcome for the art of the ’85 art movement.
[9]In 1993 when living in America, Gao Minglu wrote a letter to the artist Ren Jian then living in China, expressing his warm congratulations on Ren’s work and also expressing his own desire to return to China, to guide the movements and initiate theoretical explanations. In his letters, he talked about the ‘post-modernism’ which he read in America and remarked how it corresponds to the current situation in China. He noted: ‘Andy Warhol’s portraits of Mao are about the same size as that on the Gate of Heavenly Peace; it is like looking up at a high mountain, the meaning of which cannot be articulated’. See: Liu Chun, China’s Avant-garde Art (Zhongguo qianwei yishu), p.186.
[10]Liu Chun, Art,Life, New Trends.
[11]Ibid.
[12]Ibid.
[13]Later Song Yonghong recalled: ‘I only got to know Wang Jinsong afterwards. He was also a graduate of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. We often hung out together and slowly became quite close, getting to know each other better. At the end of 1990, we had an exhibition together at Beijing’sContemporary Art Gallery (Dangdai Meishuguan), and we each paid two thousand yuan. The response received from this exhibition was quite good and it established my foundation and reputation in the contemporary art world’. Liu Chun, Art, Life, New Trends.
[14]Li Xianting, It’s Not the Art That’s Important (Zhongyao de bushi yishu), Jiangsu Fine Arts Publishing House, 2000, p.119.
[15]Most critics regard the Liu Xiaodong Solo Exhibition and the World of Women Artists exhibition as the beginnings of the New Generation. Following these two exhibitions, there was a relaxed and undefined direction at various levels in exhibitions, including the Wang Huaxiang Exhibition, Yu Hong Exhibition, Su Xinping Exhibition, Shen Ling Painting Exhibition, and the Zhao Bandi and Li Tianhuan Exhibition. Since the participating artists in the New Generation Art Exhibition were mostly young and their works were fresh to the eye, this represented a new artistic phenomenon.
[16]‘I think Li Xianting’s critique was correct. I often like to kid around, and am quite laid back and easy-going. Therefore at the time, when people referred me as a ‘cynical realist’ or ‘hooligan’ (bopi) I thought that was OK’. Liu Chun, Art, Life, New Trends.
[17]‘I was one of the selected artists, and all five oil paintings were done in a single color of brown. I wanted to use ways of sketching mixed with oil painting. To paint with a single color was a challenge for me in terms of improving my technique and I found I could also better control the image’. Liu Chun, Art, Life, New Trends.
[18]Liu Chun, Art, Life, New Trends.
[19]Ideals and Operations (Lixiang yu caozuo), Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, 1992
[20]Liu Chun, Art, Life, New Trends.
[21]Dialogue with Tang Xin.
[22]Liu Chun, Art, Life, New Trends.
[23]Up until the end of 1999, when Song Yonghong moved to Huajiadi, his living and working spaces were both small and narrow. Liu Chun has recorded a friend’s comment in 1998: ‘Song Yonghong moved his studio eight times in Beijing, and his home with his wife changed three times. When I asked him if he was going to move again, he only said he didn’t know. He sounded helpless and exhausted when he told me. Song Yonghong and his wife now still live in the school’s building for classes and have approximately thirteen to fourteen square meters of space, which is filled with daily necessities. If four or five people entered the room at the same time, there probably wouldn’t be enough space to stand.
[24]Liu Chun, Art, Life, New Trends.
[25]‘I am not like people like Chen Wenbo, who have lived like this ever since their days at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. These artists never stopped their collective lifestyle. In my ten years or so in Beijing, I was fairly close to Wang Jinsong, but we never lived near each other. With Liu Wei too, we would have dinner together when there was a large group. If you live together, there is also this concept of life. Ideas of life, attitudes towards life and attitudes towards art are closely exchangedin a way that is complete and everyone can talk without worries. For instance, Zhang Xiaogang would talk about his divorce, Chen Wenbo would talk about his break up with his girlfriend, Feng Zhengjie would talk about his parents’ poor health and their current situation, Qiu Zhijie would talk about Cui Jian, his understanding of Zhang Xiaogang, Li Xianting, Gao Minglu and his attitudes toward our teachers, including the reasons for his Post-Sensationalism (hou-ganxing). Everyone had lots of time to talk about these things in detail. It was serious and sincere, and so it was quite enriching. For me, I treasure this period of my life, it had a very significant meaning to me, and it was a turning point pushing me forward into my next period’. Conversation with Tang Xin
[26]Song Yonghong said: ‘They were adolescents during the Cultural Revolution and until when they had exhibitions their way of thinking was obviously in opposition to the political system. From the perspective of their artistic vocabulary, either at that time or looking back from the present, we think that their art pieces were immature. When I was in college, many told me that the Stars Art Group was influential and significant, but once I saw their work, I realized that they lacked those things that would touch people. They painted in the blunt language of struggle and they were quite ideological’. Conversation with Tang Xin.
Elsewhere in the same work, he is quoted as follows: ‘Because I didn’t belong to the ’85 New Wave art group, the representatives of which were Wang Guangyi, Ren Jian, Shu Qun and others and which even included the work by Tang Song and Xiao Lu, I think the most important influence was my own perseverance in creating a distinctive style. Even now, this is what I am trying to keep doing’. Conversation with Tang Xin.
[27]Conversation with Tang Xin.
[28]Liu Chun, Art, Life, New Trends.
[29]Conversation with Tang Xin.
[30]Li Xianting, ‘Self-Comforting Happiness: Song Yonghong’s Shower Series’ (Ziwei de yukuai: Song Yonghong de Xizao xilie).
Translated by Dr. Bruce Gordon Doar