Artistic voyeur Song Yonghong paints scenes of everyday intimacy in Beijing
Beijing-based artistic voyeur Song Yonghong thrives on the complexities of life in everyday settings. Although there’s a lot of sexual intimacy in his work, the participants give off a sense of detachment—the intense stares of American Gothic meeting the lonely streets of Edward Hopper.
A Hebei native, Song received his training from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1988. Like many artists working in the 1990s, Song was among a new group of artists who moved away from the rebellious ideas of the ’85 New Wave—a grassroots avant-garde art movement that developed across China in the 1980s, experimenting with Western modern art and political liberalism—toward the subdued satirical forms of Cynical Realism, commenting on society through gentle humor. Avoiding the stagnant teachings of mainstream art colleges, Song relishes the fleeting moments of the everyday, spotting the absurd and uncertain amid the confidence and seriousness of modern China.
What differences are there between your work and the 1985 New Wave art movement?
A lot of the artists in the ’85 movement are much older than me, and they tend to be more concerned with the bigger political and historical issues that happened before the 1980s. For me, these issues are too abstract and don’t feel real. I’m more concerned with things that are tangible to me, things that I can personally perceive and experience.
How do you select what you want to put onto canvas?
My sources of inspiration are what I encounter on a daily basis. I will draw these moments, and these drawings can consist of what I’ve seen on TV, the people I meet on a regular basis, or personal encounters I have had. But sometimes these drawings don’t translate into work on canvas. Some of them stay as drawings for a long time, and then I will recycle and revisit them to integrate them into a work of art.
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Canvassing the Neighborhood is a story from our issue, “Dawn of the Debt.” To read the entire issue, become a subscriber and receive the full magazine.
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