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Lot Essay
My works are born out of fire. - Xue Song
Art creation and inspiration have always been deeply related, and Xue Song's art is inspired by fire. In the 1990s a fire burned Xue Song's studio to ashes. His collection of paintings and books were reduced to charred, unrecognisable fragments. The material loss did not detrimentally impede his career; instead the burned paper ashes inspired his creative thinking and lead him to a new path in his artistic development. From that time onwards, Xue Song deliberately uses the ashes of printed matter to create collaged images on canvas, employing iconic political and popular figures, Chinese calligraphy, landscape, and even Coca-Cola bottles, to construct new meanings and to create a critical discourse between old and the new, the East and the West.
Fire has long been associated with and thought of as a destructive force, but also a force of alchemical transformation. In China in particular, it is a symbolic element that connotes the traditional funerary customs and common rituals, where the burning process connotes the ability to connect generations together and to transcend time and space.
Four Seasons: Autumn (Lot 632) and Divine Horse (Lot 631) both use traditional Chinese landscape and animal paintings as their reference. In Four Seasons: Autumn, the composition is deconstructed and recomposed into a new modern artistic language that emphasizes the delineation of contours in black and bold colour blocks, bringing to mind the visual vocabulary of both Chinese ink-and-brush paintings and Western pop art. In Divine Horse, the reference is of Xu Beihong's classical ink paintings of galloping horses. Reinterpreting the recognizable imagery through the use a new and unexpected medium, Xue implies our perception of art is already readily defined by popular iconography, be it from a different era. In Angels of Love (Lot 630), Xue Song's reinterpretation of such a culturally popular image such as the British pop band the Beatles also comes to symbolize the power of popular iconography and figures in creating a universally recognizable image that transcends nationalities and boundaries of the East and West. As such, the artist's works not only represent the rebirth of his artistic production following a personal incident, but in successfully combining Chinese and Western, traditional and modern elements into his unique visual language, they also imply the renascence of China in the post-Cultural Revolution era.
Art creation and inspiration have always been deeply related, and Xue Song's art is inspired by fire. In the 1990s a fire burned Xue Song's studio to ashes. His collection of paintings and books were reduced to charred, unrecognisable fragments. The material loss did not detrimentally impede his career; instead the burned paper ashes inspired his creative thinking and lead him to a new path in his artistic development. From that time onwards, Xue Song deliberately uses the ashes of printed matter to create collaged images on canvas, employing iconic political and popular figures, Chinese calligraphy, landscape, and even Coca-Cola bottles, to construct new meanings and to create a critical discourse between old and the new, the East and the West.
Fire has long been associated with and thought of as a destructive force, but also a force of alchemical transformation. In China in particular, it is a symbolic element that connotes the traditional funerary customs and common rituals, where the burning process connotes the ability to connect generations together and to transcend time and space.
Four Seasons: Autumn (Lot 632) and Divine Horse (Lot 631) both use traditional Chinese landscape and animal paintings as their reference. In Four Seasons: Autumn, the composition is deconstructed and recomposed into a new modern artistic language that emphasizes the delineation of contours in black and bold colour blocks, bringing to mind the visual vocabulary of both Chinese ink-and-brush paintings and Western pop art. In Divine Horse, the reference is of Xu Beihong's classical ink paintings of galloping horses. Reinterpreting the recognizable imagery through the use a new and unexpected medium, Xue implies our perception of art is already readily defined by popular iconography, be it from a different era. In Angels of Love (Lot 630), Xue Song's reinterpretation of such a culturally popular image such as the British pop band the Beatles also comes to symbolize the power of popular iconography and figures in creating a universally recognizable image that transcends nationalities and boundaries of the East and West. As such, the artist's works not only represent the rebirth of his artistic production following a personal incident, but in successfully combining Chinese and Western, traditional and modern elements into his unique visual language, they also imply the renascence of China in the post-Cultural Revolution era.