Born in 1962, Chongqing, Xue Song was brought up in a family, with both of his parents highly educated. Despite of his crushing on oil painting for more than 40 years, he received an education of traditional Chinese culture and art. As a young man, he studied under Chen Manman, a master of traditional Chinese painting, (also known as one of the colleagues of Huang Binhong,) to copy the landscapes in The Painting Album of the Garden of Mustard (Jie Zi Yuan Hua Pu). After years of practice, he has gradually formed his own style of painting, and for all the time been crazy about landscape sketching with themes on animals, plants, mountains and stones. In 1985, he was schooled in Chongqing Fine Arts School, learning methods and technology of the western painting, sketching and body sculpturing, which has imposed an important effect on his future style of monochrome painting. After graduation, he has engaged in art education. Apparently, adding to his instinctive fondness of nature , it is his acceptance of distinguished aesthetic values towards nature of eastern and western art that has shaped his unique style of painting.
To naturally present and express the Nature has always been Xue Song’s pursuit of art.
From one hand, if we taking a look at the content of his painting, most of the creatures are from our daily life, such as dog, fish, horse, swine, or landscape; however, the artist has endued them with distinguished characters of being proud, happy, introvert, jumpy, or an outlook of being stubborn but still imperceptibly influenced by the passing time. This is what we called “The Style is the man”. From the other hand, technologically speaking, his methods of painting and creation have masterly integrated traditional Chinese painting and modern oil painting: neither does he take advantage of greasepaint to express essence of traditional theme, nor reinforce the classic concept with modern knowledge. He unveils the abstract nature of painting, picking up emotion and spirit as his way of expression. Same as the significance of instinct and spontaneity do to the Happening Art and Action Painting, Xue Song dots on the canvas with blots of paint at the beginning of painting, and then improvise to portray and design according to the current compositions of greasepaint. Therefore, the substances under his brushwork look always like a vivid creature alive, full of vitality and profundity. In respect of tones, Xue Song has inherited the tradition of classifying the ink into five different shades, taking black and gray as his own style. Even a handful patch of red, though seldom appeared in his painting, would be faded as much as possible so as to emphasize the tone of gray and pursue a wholeness featuring sober and harmonious. Besides, in sustaining the linear elegance and flexibility of traditional painting, he has broken through the sense of discursiveness, emphasizing a sense of depth presenting in western painting. In respect of aura creation, he has, paralleling with Ma Yuan, one of the four masters of Southern Song in field of painting, combined the romance and elegance, connotation and meditation of Chinese tradition together with the emphasize of condensation, depth, structure and sense of quality.
