Song Kun, who was born in Inner Mongolia in 1977, studied oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing until 2002. A founding member of the N12, a group of twelve ambitious young graduates of the Central Academy of Fine Arts who have been organizing their own annual exhibitions, Song Kun was educated after the Cultural Revolution and raised in an era of accelerated urban and economic development.

Hailed as the most promising young female artist 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 both their description of 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.

Solo Exhibitions   

2008 

Xi Jia – River Lethe, Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing, China         

2007 

Song Kun, Solo Project, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California, USA         

2006 

It’s My Life, UniversalStudios-beijing (now Boers-Li Gallery), Beijing, China  

Group Exhibitions

2008 

Looking for Me, Minsheng Contemporary Arts Center, Shanghai, China         

2007 

2nd Documentary Exhibition of Fine Arts Forms of Concepts, Wuhan, China         2006 

Body - Boundary, Chambers Fine Art, New York, USA

Transgression, PIFO New Art Studio, Beijing, China

Chaos City, UniversalStudios-beijing (now Boers-Li Gallery), Beijing, China

N12 New Paintings No. 4, C5 Gallery, Beijing, China         

2005 

Naughty Kids, Star Gallery, Beijing, China

N12 New Paintings No. 3, CAFA Gallery, Beijing, China

The Second Chinese Art Triennial, Nanjing Art Museum, Nanjing, China 

Jie Li Bang, Art110 Gallery, Beijing, China         

2004 

New Wave, Art Seasons Gallery, Beijing, Singapore 

N12 New Paintings No. 2, CAFA Gallery, Beijing, China

Mode of Sensibility, Art Seasons Gallery, Singapore 

Made in China, Design in France, Paul Ricard Gallery, Paris, France 

Beijing-Dezoned-Paris, Le Cube, Issy les Moulineaux, France         

2003 

She, Art Seasons Gallery, Beijing, China

N12 New Paintings No. 2, CAFA Gallery, Beijing, China

Beyond the Face and Surface, Art Seasons Gallery, Singapore         

2000 

Water: First Show of Exo-Site Art Program, Huanyi Warehouse, Beijing China         1999 

The Second Factory Time, Yunfeng Gallery, Beijing, China