Author: SONG KUN 宋琨

Size: 65×91cm

Signed and dated: Painted in 2003

Estimate: 300,000 -500,000

Final Price: RMB 370,000

titled and signed in Chinese, dated 2003 (on the reverse)
As a contemporary artist born in the 1970s, Song Kun's works have completely deviated from the grand narrative mode of early Chinese contemporary art and turned to drawing materials from personal life experience and emotional changes. As she said: 'at the beginning of each series of works, I was basically unconscious, and more of them were the role of memory, emotion and imagination. I like those three-dimensional, flowing and unrestricted experiences.' From the early Diary, Occultator No.4 (Lot 1078) and South Lake series to the recent Mackerel series which are full of mythological elements, Song Kun has always explored the relationship among real life, subconsciousness and imagination in his works. The fierce collision between social changes and internal emotions has created complex and changeable contents in her works, while the sensitivity of female identity endows her with gentle vision and lyrical narrative style.
After graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2002, Song Kun began to create a series of self portraits titled the Occultator. In this series, the artist gradually eliminated the realistic elements and logicality, and instead interwoven reality and illusion in a stream of consciousness way, created a strange scene of unrestrained nature. The artist does not structure her works according to the objective time and space sequence, but is completely self-oriented, and expresses the habitual, subconscious and even unconscious inner world through various fantasy images deliberately set. Therefore, her self-portrait is no longer a true representation, but an inner monologue. The Occultator No.4 (Lot 1078), created in 2003, can be regarded as the leader of this series. The artist frames a moment in daily life with a camera like viewfinder, focusing on the face and hands of the object. In the picture, the artist closes her eyes and meditates, as if entering a meditative world. The facial depiction is accurate and vivid, and the delicate texture of the skin leaps onto the canvas with the help of subtle light changes. In the normal facial features, the artist has sharp ears like fairy tales. The cat at the bottom left of the picture is set to have a profound and wonderful echo with the artist's self-image at the layout and spiritual level. Between the interdependence and pull of 'spirit and flesh', it reflects complex internal emotions such as confusion, tranquility, anxiety, fear and so on.
The Couples (Lot 1079), which was created in 2009, is based on the poem 'six prefectures song•peach blossom' by Han Yuanji, a poet from the Southern Song Dynasty: 'people grow old and spring grows well. It is a dream.' This word takes chanting peach blossom as a clue, or tells a love story explicitly or implicitly: first meet in the peach blossom season, then travel together on the Peach Blossom Street, and then revisit the old place. People are old, spring is still the same, but they don't see the old people, so they can only wander alone, sigh and mourn. Like the artistic conception in his poems, Song Kun also describes the brilliance and withering of a love in her paintings, showing the impermanence of love with the sweetness of the past and the disappearance of the present. From the perspective of composition, the whole picture draws on the layout of traditional Chinese ink painting. In a small landscape landscape painting space of the Northern Song Dynasty, the fog is vast, the rocks are jagged, the cold branches are rustling, the leaves are falling one after another, and a couple are standing side by side in the face of the bleak winter scenery. In terms of character modeling, the artist depicts a rare figure. Through this 'look at each other' between people and the scene, the viewer is stimulated to bring his own perspective and experience, and complete the most private interpretation of the love story in their own imagination. In this regard, Song Kun removed the exciting and beautiful charm in the original Ci, replaced it with a sad and dark style, and told her experience and insight into love in a unique way full of poetic and emotional tension.