EXHIBITION

Xi Jia – River Lethe: A Song Kun Solo Exhibition

Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing, Beijing, 09/27/2008 - 10/26/2008

ABOUT

Boers-Li Gallery is pleased to announce that Song Kun will be featured in the next solo exhibition in the main space, Gallery I. Entitled Xi Jia – River Lethe, the exhibition will open to the public on 27 September and run through 26 October. Song Kun, a graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, was born in Inner Mongolia in 1977. Along with a number of her peers, her figurative painting began attracting attention through the annual N12 exhibitions as early as 2002. In 2007, she presented her project It’s My Life in a solo exhibition in the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, U.S.A. Hailed as one of the most promising young female artists during the 2005 Triennial of Chinese Art, Song Kun’s work examines the minutiae of daily existence. The artist portrays an inherently individual perspective, collecting on canvas the concerns, fears, desires, growth, happiness, and confusion of daily life: the fleeting, innermost feelings of her generation. The meaning of her paintings lies in their description of both the physical and the emotional; they represent, perhaps, a sugar-coated protest against contemporary life. While her paintings are less overtly political than many of her predecessors and contemporaries, she uses her own unique visual language to give expression to the concerns and desires of everyday life, building an archive of those moments of peak emotion, cognition, and memory. Her most recent work interprets mobility, migration, and movement as political and sentimental devices of both control and resistance that have become characteristic of life in contemporary China. Her new work moves towards installation and sculpture, in addition to the oil painting and sketching for which she is known. This exhibition recreates the pseudo-domestic dream space with which the artist has experimented previously, although this time pushing it from a portrayal of a singular room to an entire galaxy of affect and emotion. In the darkened space of the exhibition hall, points of light emanate from the objects in which Song Kun has invested little bits of herself. Collectively entitled Xi Jia and named after the recurring protagonist in many of Song Kun’s works, these works embrace images of beautiful destruction, the perception of which is inextricably tied to the emotional response of the viewer. The viewer is confronted with a mixture of broken glass, cotton balls, light-colored foam, cartoon-like paintings and sketches, and antique baubles. These various pieces realign notions of beauty and maturity by putting them into dialogue with memory and emotion.

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