Xue Song 薜松

Xue Song, born in 1965 in Anhui Province, China. He works and lives in An Hui Province. He graduated from the Shanghai Drama Institute, Stage Art Department in 1988 and is one of the leading artists of contemporary Chinese Pop Art.

Xue Song is well known for his innovative combination of contemporary and traditional elements where calligraphy, folk art and ink paintings meet modern techniques. He began his initial experiments with collage after being inspired by Western art, especially Pop Art and the works of Robert Rauschenberg in the 1980s. He is acclaimed as the first artist in China to bring western collage onto the contemporary Chinese art scene. After a tragic destruction of his studio by fire in 1990, Xue started to incorporate charred remnants of past work, books, and other belongings — remains that served as a constant reminder of the past — while "burning" and "collaging" have become distinctive elements within his artistic language.

‘I discovered some kind of “mark” from this fire, I found a language form that enabled me to speak…’ The treatment of ready made pictorial images and text prints through selection, disintegration, burning, restructuring, collage and drawing to eventually produce the new image which meets his own requirement is the special creation steps of Xue Song. Borrowing the power of “fire”, he explores the reality and illusion of art from the destruction and regeneration of pictorial images.

Xue Song's works are collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, University of Southern California Asia Pacific Museum, Bonn Museum of Modern Art, Germany, China Art Museum, Shanghai Art Museum, Long Museum, Hong Kong M+ Art Museum, Bill Gates Art Foundation and other institutions. He has held solo exhibitions in Shanghai Art Museum, Xi'an Art Museum, MOCA in Singapore, The Ueno Royal Museum in Japan etc. In 2019, he held a solo exhibition “Xue Song: Phoenix Art from the Ashes” at Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai.