The Park
Artist: Song Yuanyuan
Vernissage: June 6th, 16:00-19:00
Duration: 2020/6/6- 2020/8/29
Venue: Room 204, Bldg 4A, 50 Moganshan Rd, Shanghai, China
Tel: +86 21 52522551
Vanguard Gallery is pleased to present Song Yuanyuan’s first solo exhibition at the gallery: The Park, from June 6th, 2020 to August 29th, 2020. Last year, Song exhibited some of his new works in the dual solo exhibition Poetry of the Rebels, this time, he will bring the whole collection with a much more mature tongue.
With the expansion of modern urbanization and massive change in people’s lifestyle, park, is slowly becoming a overlooked infrastructure in the city. The atmosphere in the park thus becomes abstract, like a painting in progress. In the city where the artist is based and born, Shenyang, was once known as the “eldest son of the republic”, of which Tiexi district was the most typical example of Stalinist industrialization under planned economy.It contained 90% of the city’s factories, large workers’ villages and parks built by the government in the 50s.By the late 1990s, factories were disappearing from the city, leaving the parks with their walls torn down, remained as people’s favourite haunt.
This park, stripped from previous appearance, it develops limitlessly in terms of boundary and functionality. It has become a symbol, like a giant billboard, magnetizing the people around it. For these people, the park is the only place for them to express themselves and their ego: they operate in a specific way within a specific area; of course, for them all these are serious. The concentrated crowd looks like a tent, where the old men babble on the current social events or sink in nostalgia about their passion in the past; the lottery stand is always full of people and cigarette ends, the numbers in the black-and-white check box on the wall speak for their fate and future. The flattened and symbolized park, becomes a miniature of the reality; its singular theme is awkward, but not less harmonious. The noise, expression and emotion of the crowd grow up into a floating ball, squeezing down the air underneath, eventually form a black force filed, in the reflection of which, the artist sees each possibility of his alter ego. Slowly, he can’t tell whether they are entertaining or destructing collectively, he starts to question the frontier of his own consciousness. He suspects that he is another kind of people, the brilliant and bleak Gemini, one inside of the park, the other outside of it.
Within the park, Song Yuanyuan explores the contradiction between the formative liberation and the continuance of collective behavior in the same physical space. He follows the macro-contradiction, using common and often grotesque environments, the objects and subjects in the environments and the relation between them as clue, progressively elaborates his pursue and associate of individual spiritual liberation and egoism.
We are pigs, 2019, Charcoal, pencil, paint and acrylic on the paper, 39.5 x 57.5 cm.
Installation View
About the Artist
Song Yuanyuan, born in Shenyang,China in 1981. Graduated from Department of Photography, Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in 2005.Drawing inspiration from images, photos and pictures, his works embody the desire and lure for reality and illusion and the contradictions, which the juxtaposition of these two might create. Song’s artistic language is based on his perceptions and feelings when confronted with everyday spaces, common and often grotesque environments, miserable places where all that has been left behind are marks of human presence. Abandoned traditional narrativity in his paintings with a diminishing attempt in portraying a three dimensional space, Song tries to depict a sense of emotion through collaging objects.He strives to employ the fragmental expression of modern poetry and transform the words into images, offering an anomalous aesthetic with a violent approach to the representation. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: “Farm”, Chi K11 Art Space, Shenyang, China(2020); “Poetry of the rebels”, Vanguard Gallery,Shanghai,China(2019);”Downstage,Upstaged”, Plateform China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing,China(2016).
