song yong hong-chinese contemporary artist,

Song Yong Hong 宋永红

Song Yong Hong (b.1966-) a backbone of "85 New Wave" in Shaanxi province, has been living in Beijing since 1989. In the early 1990s, he painted the life of city youths in what became known as Cynical Realism. The people under his brush are always wearing the same smile, revealing an affected reality that is empty and boring. His later paintings dig deeper in life. Somewhere in the mid-1990s, when he began to paint his "bath" series, his art went from the cynical to the absurd.

Taking a bath is the most private time of one's day, the only time people can truly face themselves and be real. In Song's paintings, water pours down from unexpected places, splattering everywhere, giving the viewer as well as the people in the painting a sudden, inexplicable flushing. He interprets the feeling or the sense of the moment. Song's painting moves the viewer by stirring up an inarticulate something inside of them, the small details, fragments, and scraps of their everyday life. The water, heavy and thick, has symbolic meaning. His paintings are not only metaphoric, but also absurd. Song painted them purely and concisely.