 
hen Xue Song talks about his work, he says things like, “My works originated from fire.” And he is not exaggerating at all. Xue Song, the Shanghai artist, uses burned paper and wood ashes to create collages. He has been doing this for more than a decade, and it has helped him make a name for himself as one of the country’s best-known artists.
Xue Song’s studio is located in Shanghai's M50, or Moganshan Road, arts district. He's in building No. 8, on the second floor of an old shabby building. On a recent afternoon, during an interview, you could see his latest work hanging in the studio, entitled, “Beauties on Calendar.”
Elsewhere in the studio, there were frames lying around and a worktable piled high with painting materials. Xue says with a smile that some recent works were just removed for an exhibition at the Zhangjiang Art Gallery in Shanghai.
Xue Song, born in the 1960s, was a child of the Cultural Revolution. He is part of a generation that has seen rapid economic changes and political reform. And yet his art is not so much Political Pop as something that has come to be called “Pan-Pop.”
Compared with those artists who produced art works that have been dubbed “Political Pop,” his works are plain, emotional and not obviously critical; and the images in his works are also not limited in politics, but contain all aspects in history, culture and society.
The music critic Li Wan once described the 60s vividly: “During childhood, nobody cared or asked; we played hard during these shocking times.  Early in youth, we experienced routines, we wrote poetry, sang, read and day dreamed.” in the wildness, the shock of era occasionally passed through their indifferent eyes; early youth, experienced routine, wrote poetry, sang, read, day-dreamed; when we became adults we changed from reflecting on everything to thinking about nothing, from a world of ideals to a world without ideals.”
The development of Xue Song seems to match this description. He was born in Tangshan, Anhui Province in 1965. In 1984, he passed the examination of the Stage Design Department of Shanghai Opera Institute, which somehow became a fortunate step in his career.
The Stage Design Department of Shanghai Opera Institute has a history of more than 50 years and was initially set up to train art workers to design stages. But instead, it gave birth to some very createive artists, like Cai Guoqiang and Chen Jian.
In Xue Song’s opinion, it relates to the intrinsic advantage of art departments in the opera institute, that was, in such a free circumstance, the students were not required to gain a certain level of skill as the students in art colleges. Therefore the students in this kind of environment could develop more independent and bold art concepts.
“I don’t care much about how many elements of painting there are on my paintings. My works reach to the terminal of seeing directly: the meaning of image,” he says.
 His statements sound clear and decisive. However, the pursuit of the clear and decisive is only found in an exploration of Xue Song’s work.
Xue Song began creating collages as an undergraduate. And it became the very basic vocabulary of his later works.
One inspiration came from the time in the 1985 when he went to Beijing to see an exhibition by Robert Rauschenberg, a master of collage. Rauschenberg liked to create works by destroying and recomposing old materials. The artistic form, which had been forgotten by contemporary art circles, showed its new vitality through Xue Song’s deliberate skill and his magic transformation of meaning.
Those who are familiar with Xue Song will never forget the impact of a fire that occurred in the painting studio of the opera house 16 years ago. At that time, he had already earned his bachelor’s degree and he was working at the Shanghai Opera House.
He was producing independent art, and exploring Chinese and western art traditions. But he couldn’t find his own art language.
“I wanted to break Chinese tradition and surpass western modernism. It is easy to say, but very difficult to realize,” he said.
When the fire occurred in the winter of 1990, it changed his art career. “The fire destroyed all my belongings and all the works I had collected in going from small town boy to big city boy.”
He went on: “If it had never happened, today my art certainly would not have been like this.” The disarray and ashes, together with the foul smell, inspired a special sense of aesthetic inside Xue Song. It was perhaps solemn and stirring. He saw the possibility and help him find a language for his type of art.
He decided to move the image of “burning” to canvas. Then he found those burned books, sheets, painting albums and other things left over from the fire and contemplated them and then created a collage using them.
 He had a feeling that something would appear, “Initially it was like a scientific experiment by an artist, and I was rather excited,” he recalls.
Then Xue Song began his art experiment. Fortunately, his creative concept attracted attention soonafter. In 1992, the British Embassy in China hosted Xue Song’s first solo exhibition in Beijing. Only ten works were exhibited, but the show encouraged Xue Song, who wanted to perfect his art works.
His style of burning things, and using glue to create a collage became more and more distinctive over time.
When the leftovers from the fire were used up, he went into old bookstores, bought various old newspapers and magazines and intentionally burned them.
His friends sent him their old books, and he went from merely burning things to contemplating the meaning behind the burned images.
“I create works probably like shooting: at first I aim at my target, and once I decide where to aim, then I begin to destroy, to burn, to distribute and compose the materials like writing papers with an argument.”
The point is that those burned papers, which were the basis of his argument, were not common blank pages, but media with symbols, characters such as newspapers, painting albums, books with cultural information.
These mediums included all kinds of materials, dealing with social and political reform, culture, historic events and so on. They were burned and recomposed into new images, implying that the meaning was transformed as well.
For commemorating the 100th anniversary of Chairman Mao’s birthday in 1994, he created the “Mao” series, a silhouette of Mao composed by various news, historical records, images and collages. The series, which like most of his works was exhibited abroad, won acclaim at the “Awakening China” exhibition held in Bonn, Germany in 1996. Many visitors remembered that a Chinese artist held a conversation with the great man through burning and producing a collage.
Since the mid 1990s, Xue Song has been producing works like “Conversations with Masters,” “Coca-Cola,” “Landscape of the Old Days,” and “Calligraphy.” These works concerned all aspects in society, history and culture and represented his long-standing creative concept, wihc was to select existing images which the public is familiar with to creat a bridge to transform the meaning of the printings that are regarded as “Materials,” and reflects his consistent attitude toward culture, a mild criticism.
“My works seem to involve many participants,” Xue Song says. “I am taking the power and wisdom of ancients to express my concepts more effectively.”
Indeed, his works relate to lots of figures in history. “Conversation with Masters” was a new way of saying something about the artistic masterpieces of the east and west. In the series of “Saluting to Masters,” Picasso, Mondrian, Qi Baishi, Xu Beihong and other masters were the targets he saluted to. And “Great Stars” celebrated 1930s Shanghai and its movie stars, which was recently developed as the “Beauties of Old Shanghai Series.”
Now his works are widely exhibited. “I should say that I am lucky, my art career is comparatively smooth,” he says.
The artist couldn’t help sighing with emotion when recalling how his art career got underway. If it is true that Xue Song’s art career might be considered smooth, it owes to his long-standing simple lifestyle as an artist.
 In the 1990s, Chinese contemporary art was going through a slow stage and the public wasn’t paying attention to art. To choose to be a professional artist in an age to get married and start career was not easy then.
Unlike other classmates, who followed business, Xue Song resigned from Shanghai Opera House and became a professional artist in 1995. Soonafter, he moved his painting studio to a factory area at Moganshan Road, along the Suzhou River.
The Moganshan Road area was still populated by a poor and shabby residential houses and factories. “The reason to choose this place was: firstly, it was near my home; secondly, the rent was cheap,” he said.
“I was living nearby and worked in the studio from noon to night. At the time it was very shabby here and many residents were raising pigs.” He never imagined then that this shabby corner of the city would later become a world renowned art community.
He also never imagined that contemporary art could flourish so much a decade later.
By 1992, Xue Song was already selling his works. “It was a foreign lawyer,” he said. “The painting was sold by $1,000 and it felt like a very big money.” In 1995, ShanghArt Gallery in Shanghai began cooperating with him. His works were mainly sold overseas, especially in Germany and Switzerland. And in Xue Song’s opinion, the reason why his works are highly accepted in Germany is mostly because of the conflict between history and reality reflected from the works. Now the average price of his works is $15,000 per square meter.
In 2002, Xue Song exhibited “Fashion” and the “Calligraphy Series,” which presented his creative tendency in recent years, in a solo exhibition named “Irrelative.” On the one hand, he has been perfecting “Calligraphy,”  “Landscape of the Old Days” and other series, which were revised from traditional art images and implied his interest and fascination for traditional art; on the other hand, he has been paying closer attention to fashionable life and image resources from the world of luxury. His fashion series and “Children of Mali” series are representative of the latter genre: The silhouette on the painting originated from the photos of starving children in Mali, taken by the Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado; the background is filled with layers of collage with images of fashion and pleasure. He presents his reflection and criticism of the fashionable life through a conflict between two kinds of images that imply fairly different values. And to design this kind of paradox is always his interest.
To Li Xu, the advisor of this exhibition, “Xue Song is a terminator of printing.”
What Xue Song does is he deconstructs the works of his predecessors and reconstructs the meaning of those images. As for the images in his works, no matter whether they are great men or landscape paintings, the recomposed images are ambiguous in meaning and imply a sense of bantering. However they seem to be overturning our monotonous judgment of the real world anyway. Furthermore, just as what Wu Liang said, “They originated from ashes. This is indeed profound in meaning.”
translated by Huzhu
Image 1:
Image 2: Xue Song is painting
Image 3:
Image 4:
Image 5: Mao Zedong (Four Works) 2004
Image 6:
Image 7:
Related Links:
·Artist Profile: Xue Song
·Xue Song Solo Exhibition
|
