1918 ArtSPACE will be dispaying the last series of paintings by Chinese emerging artist Song Yonghua.

The show is curated by Irina Pavlov.

"Piercing colors of the inner contradictions"

Song Yonghua belongs to a group of Chinese emerging artists. His energy and youth depict burning traces of colors on canvases. For him colors are the strongest medium to mirror his own emotional landscapes. The explosion of colors is used not only to picture nature and natural environment as the last resort for body and soul, but also to freeze the silent moment of human interaction. The nature is the escapism Song Yonghua is aiming at.

The vast space on paintings filled with fireworks of colors gives a broad perspective on man-toward-nature attitude. The absence of human figures on them doesn’t mean that Song Yonghua is not referring to the man, but quite opposite. Nature gives us a comfort; it’s a soul asylum from constant tiring clashes with present social and cultural realm. Song Yonghua sees nature not as a backdrop of our existence, but as an equal fragment of our inner selves. He shares his inner sceneries by portraying nature in its full frontal view. And that’s where the contradiction starts…in a wish to portray nature as a disjointed part of us, Song Yonghua finds people so distant from the nature.

Song Yonghua’s landscapes are monumental on different levels. The size of canvases is firstly offering us a space broad enough to ask ourselves and to contemplate on our own position in the nature. Space is giving us the broadness, not the distance from the nature! Song Yonghua organizes space on paintings in highly complex rhythms. He is occupying our attention with a single focus on a painting, a center that encircles our mood. Center is a perplexed hank of emotions gushing from a mountain’s womb, an island, a sea. At the same time, that very center is surrounded by a calm and peaceful background somewhere far away. His landscapes are turning into abstract forms created by heavy brush strokes rich in color. There we see continual collision between colors in Song Yonghua’s desire to show mood changes. His paintings boil with emotions stuck in strong and severe brush strokes. Thick layers of colors have the same purpose of emphasizing composite feelings. The absence of details in the composition and the structure on the paintings is replaced by a rich palette of colors.

Being educated in Chinese traditional way of thinking, Song Yonghua is familiar with Chinese traditional art forms. In his creativity he firmly fosters the feelings for the Chinese calligraphy, traditional poetry, paintings. His landscapes are full of “Chinesness”, namely Chinese connotation and Chinese essence in art. As his subject relates easily to traditional ideology, the execution finds something new. Song Yonghua’s paintings have been likened to visual poems capturing the wonders of nature on canvas. Empty space contains the possibility for transformation. It reinforces the main subject while being of vital importance for the structural composition of the paintings. Melancholy, sadness, loneliness, emptiness, confusion, infinite inquiries…they are all equal elements of Song Yonghua’s landscapes.

Every painting veils (buries) layers of stories hidden underneath. Those stories, those meanings haunt us, because they are layers of our own memories. Some of the motives and images are easily recognized on the surface and others are buried forever…Song Yonghua’s paintings ask us to recall our own dreaming, and then to reach time before it, a prenatal stage, because only at that stage we can recognize ourselves as an impartible fragment of nature.

Text by Irina Pavlov