“邻居”宋永红个展

本次展览是艺术家近几年绘画作品的一次集中呈现。展览名字“邻居”，源自艺术家今年创作的同名作品《邻居》。

作为八十年代后期出道，1990年代开始活跃于当代艺术界且独具个人绘画风格的艺术家，宋永红的作品与同时代艺术家的创作题材不同，他从不追求宏大的政治表达，以及哲学化的观念思辨。1988年，他从浙江美术学院（现中国美术学院）版画系毕业，其毕业作品《校园生活》是一组铜版画，刻画的是校园生活中的种种场景，这几乎奠定了宋永红日后创作的整个基调：关注自身，关注自己的眼睛所见；专注近距离的日常生活，以及个人的生存环境状态；进而以自己为关照点，用最直接、鲜亮的颜色和最日常的片段，点映出一个个普通人物的生存状态。

纵览其三十余年的创作生涯，追求“画面情感”也一直贯穿始终，并与现实感受紧密贴合在一起。这种对画面情感的极致追求促使艺术家一直紧盯身边，来画眼见和心感的周围，于是目光所及，便是心像；只是目及之处因个人而带有某种永恒性，此即艺术家独立的风格语言，这使得宋永红的创作仿佛永远都在改造“旧画”，它远比绘制“新作”耗时费力，但所谓的“好画”往往只能从绝望中拯救出来。

这种对画面终极“绝望感”的追求，使得宋永红一次次谦卑地来观看现实，理解其中那些“不确定性”与“无意义性”，当这两种体验交替发生作用，便造就了画面中强烈的荒诞感。而近几年作品中的“荒诞”又透露出一种平静，它抵消了观者阅后的焦躁，也去除了某种暧昧，但平静背后即将到来的危险却跃跃欲出。

他的近作中还出现了越来越多周围“人物”的形象，这些写实的人物状态，与我们熟悉的街道构成画面，仿佛刺目的阳光晃过视线，让我们得以低下头来再看这些熟悉的人。宋永红也刻意用高纯度的颜色和明确的轮廓线来强化形象，并以尽量平静的心态和写实的背景来反衬人物状态，使其既真实又突兀且不失自然。与其说，这种对周围人物形象的想象是一种心理上的认知，不如说是精神上的写实，他们从超现实主义的美学跃出，指向了人生存在意义上的荒诞、挣扎、平静以及自尊。

Hunsand Space is delighted to present artist Song Yonghong’s solo exhibition, “The Neighborhood.”

This exhibition presents the works of the artist from recent years. The exhibition title, "The Neighborhood", comes from the artist's work of the same name "The Neighborhood" created this year.

As an artist who started out in the late 1980s and has established his painting style and been active in the art world since the 1990s, Song Yonghong has chosen subject matters different from his contemporaries. He did not pursue grand political expressions or philosophical conceptual speculation. In 1988, he graduated from the printmaking department of the Zhejiang Art Academy (now the China Academy of Fine Art), with a lithograph, Campus Life, portraying the various life scenes on campus. This work set the tone for Song Yonghong’s later practice, which focuses on the self, on what his eyes have seen, paying attention to the everyday life of his immediate surrounding, and the contexts and circumstances of one's living conditions. He adopts his perspective as a point of interest, and the most straightforward and vibrant colors, the most quotidian moments, projecting the existence of an ordinary person.

Looking across his more than three decades of art practice, the pursuit for “pictorial emotions" has been consistently present in his works, intimately resonating with those from everyday reality. The pursuit of such pictorial emotions urged the artist to focus on the lives in the immediate surroundings, allowing him to paint what he’s seen and felt. Hence, what the eyes perceive becomes an image of the mind. What the eyes perceive eternalizes with the artist's independent and stylistic language of painting. This makes it seem that Song Yonghong’s practice is a renewal of "old paintings" , which can be more time consuming than to paint "new works" yet often the "good paintings" are salvaged from desperation.

The pursuit for the ultimate “desperation” on the tableau humbles Song Yonghong to examine reality, to sense the “uncertainties” and “meaninglessness ”- two types of experiences overlap and affect one another – create the compelling sense of absurdity. In recent years, the sense of absurdity reveals a kind of calm, dissolving the viewer's anxiety and ambiguity from looking but replaced by a burgeoning sense of danger.

Among the artist's recent works, "figures" in his immediate surrounding appear more frequently. These realistic portrayals allow us to associate with the streets we are familiar. And the seemingly blinding radiance from Song Yonghong’s canvases urges us to look at these familiar faces with our heads down. The artist’ adopts unblended colors and distinctive contouring lines to enhance the figuration, against a seemingly nonchalant, concrete background to contrast with the figures. In so doing, he affords them a loftiness in reality. Instead of conceiving the artist's imagination of people in his surrounding as a psychological understanding, it's better to think of them as a kind of realism in one's mind. They have leaped out of the surrealist aesthetics to embolden the absurdity, struggles, calm, and integrity of human existence.

Song Yonghong (b. 1966, Heibei) graduated from the Printmaking Department of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art) in 1988, and now lives and works in Beijing. His works have been widely exhibited at home and abroad including, China Landscapes- Selection from the Taikang Collection; Beijing (2019); Neither East Nor West-New Works by Contemporary Chinese Artists, Art Gallery of Cleveland State University, USA (2019); 1199 People – Collection from the Long Museum, Long Museum, Shanghai/Xi'an (2014); Thirty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art (Painting), Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2010), etc. Song Yonghong’s works are part of major public art collections including, the Guangdong Art Museum; Taikang Collection; White Rabbit Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; China Society Hong Kong; Fung Ping Shan Museum, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, etc.