Lot 661: SONG YONGHONG

SONG YONGHONG B. 1966 HOMETOWN signed in Pinyin and Chinese and dated 1998 oil on canvas 149.5 by 150 cm.; 58 3/4 by 59 in.

China, Guangdong Museum of Art, Square of Desire: Song Yonghong, 2008, p.120

Song Yonghong, Beijing Art Now Gallery, 2006, p.205

Song Yonghong is the most skilled storyteller of his cohort, the group of artists collectively known as "cynical realists." While his contemporaries like Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun have devoted years to the exploration of singular motifs and styles, Song has instead focused on the evocative power of the canvas to do the work of literature. Even at their simplest, his works tell stories. Like Quentin Tarantino's body of film, they draw on a pool of overlapping but distinct characters who seem to distantly know one another. Song is above all an observer, as witnessed in eminent critic Li Xianting's statement that, "Song Yonghong's work has always taken an observer's attitude of indifference, ridicule, and voyeurism. He discovers the boring, disgusting and pretentious humor in our common lives and thus reveals people's awkward, pathetic and laughable behavior."

The late 1990s mark the period of Song Yonghong's true emergence as a mature painter. After youthful experiments with boxier figures in imaginative but still stock scenarios, it was at the end of this turbulent decade that he first began to let his skills as a narrator complement his verve as a draftsman. His 1998 work Hometown (Lot 661), offered here, is a prime example of this transition in effect. This composition is sufficiently complex to evoke a variety of ideas about the social environment of the moment, undergoing intense transition. Industrial buildings line a road which leads back along the perspectival plane to the painting's single vanishing point, marked unceremoniously by a cypress-like tree, its foliage resembling nothing so much as industrial smoke. Faintly visible along the buildings are the numerical markings above doors that denote the various entrances or danyuan of a high-socialist era apartment block. These residential and factory compounds were the basis of economic and social life for the several decades after the founding of the People's Republic, particularly in the northeastern region where Song grew up.

The absolute entanglement of life and work is manifest in the way an industrial conduit seems to bind the apartment buildings in, tracing the same route as the carless road below. The curvature of its exaggerated shadow seems at first a formal effect, meant to play off the contrasting curves of the sidewalk and its curb. Upon further contemplation these dark arcs emerge instead as shadows of soul and spirit, betraying in the abstract a whole realm of considerations lying just below the surface of everyday life.

Of course the most interesting aspect of this painting is the unlikely scene that transpires among its three figures. Two men, dressed in the de facto uniform of the post-socialist industrial functionary, walk in two different directions, seemingly at pains to deny any connection between themselves. The blue-coated figure in the foreground reveals just slightly more of himself by virtue of his position vis-à-vis the frame; in his weary eyes we see the exasperation of years of hard work, but also a guardedness borne of having to wield power or perhaps maintain secrets too heavy to share. The man at right, slightly older, seems to be defined by his leather possessions—leather jacket, leather shoes—that are totems of technocratic success. He looks ahead, his mouth agape, his eyes thoroughly indifferent to the world around him.

At the center of the canvas, like Botticelli's Venus, stands a young woman in a modest undergarment, right arm draped across her own torso. She looks straight at the viewer but also seems to be gazing upon both men at once, immediately raising a bizarre set of questions—starting with, What is this lovely creature doing in this state of undress in such a public location? Are we to assume a triangulation among the three characters, or would that be a semiotic trap? Perhaps the woman is to function in another symbolic realm entirely, more emblem or icon than actual figure? Or perhaps Song Yonghong has chosen to tell a story of romantic intrigue with these figures depicted in their representative configuration, a sort of timeless manifestation of a small-town romance gone awry. Notably, the woman, despite her vulnerability, comes across as the strongest of the figures, the only one daring, proud, or forthright enough to look straight ahead.

The second, smaller canvas in this sale—also from 1998—offers something indirect in the way of confirmation of our worst suspicions. Here a worker in his blue jumpsuit lies upon a supine woman. Her hands are self-bound above her head, her lips curled in an expression of either pain, or ecstasy, or both. Titled simply Grassland (Lot 662), the painting is evasive about who is actually in control. The worker, for one, has his face obscured as if on a true-crime television program. Is this to suggest that he is the perpetrator of a vicious crime? A consumer of paid sex? Or simply a working-class everyman, his face irrelevant to the larger machinations of the society which he so diligently serves? In this work, as in many others, Song Yonghong uses his beautifully refined palette and technique to ask more questions than he answers, leaving the viewer in a perpetual state of mystery and curiosity.