In 1839 the French painter Paul Delaroche, having seen an early type of photograph known as a daguerreotype, famously, and controversially, announced the death of painting. Nevertheless somehow, even in the face of such a declaration, painting persisted only to be proclaimed dead once again by the Russian critic Nikolai Tarabukin in 1922… and there have been just as many deaths and rebirths of the artform ever since.

 

In some instances the death of painting and its rebirth have taken place almost simultaneously; one could say the form is almost phoenix-like. Distinct from that mythological beast however painting has never been entirely lost prior to its rebirth/reinvention. Painting has never truly become extinct. One of the most extraordinary and puzzling things about painting as a medium is that it persists at all given the critical disregard for the artform over the last century, the competition it has from other (newer) mediums and the risk it faces from sheer analytical ennui – many current theorists are quite simply bored of trying to articulate what painting is or to argue its merits over and over again.

 

Yet for some reason artists still make, or aspire to make, paintings. Academics, critics and journalists still write about painting and the public still visit and admire exhibitions of paintings in museums and galleries all over the world. Paintings that are being created at this moment are, of course, representative of the ‘now’, but they also bear the heavy burden of the centuries old history and tradition of painting. Paintings are simultaneously new and not new, familiar and unfamiliar.

 

Somewhat perversely, painting in the 21st century has regained its position as an avant garde practice and may well have developed into a subversive act. Artists such as the Italian American painter Rudolf Stingel use their techniques to confuse, seduce and then subvert. Painting in 2017 is almost anarchic, often contradictory and for many, be that artist or viewer, painfully difficult. Many artists have consciously worked towards this position, it has been particularly, and critically noted, for example in contemporary painting from China.

 

 

“A simple, but powerful strategy employed by many avant-garde Chinese artists to make their works explicitly ‘contemporary’ is to subvert traditional art mediums. The trend of subverting painting emerged in the 1980s… An increasing number of artists abandoned their former training in traditional or Western painting… their successors in the present choose whether to abandon painting altogether.”

 

Wu Hung ‘A Case of Being “Contemporary”’ in Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader ed: Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio, MIT Press Cambridge USA and London, UK, 2011

 

 

Countering this proposition however Sheauming Song’s work is deeply complex, paradoxical and multi-layered in both image and concept. In researching his work I have found myself moving from one position to another, leaving one departure point, finding myself on one path, being diverted onto an entirely different route only to find myself at an unexpected destination. Consequently this text has broken down, almost by happenstance, into a number of explorations that are in one way distinct and autonomous – and could easily be extended into a longer text – but simultaneously harbour synergies and cross-references that themselves warrant further exploration.

 

Overlaid onto this main text are sentences or short paragraphs. Some of these words have, as I have been writing, surfaced in my mind as doubts, queries and even contradictions in response to what I’ve written. Some of the words are the thoughts, comments or reflections of the artist himself that have been expressed as we have discussed plans for this text over several months. It is important to incorporate these elements as they, in turn, go some way to articulating the challenge encountered in writing about painting as a medium in 2017 and in writing about Sheauming Song’s work in particular.

 

A number of authors have approached Song’s work from the point of view of Realism and the critical theory that evolved, and now revolves, around what was essentially a mid-nineteenth century, primarily French, artistic movement. A movement that was primarily a counter to the sickly sweet Romantic period that preceded it.

 

 

 

Sheauming Song is not a realist

he is an un-realist

 

Pictorial realism still holds a strong position in contemporary art and has a place in almost all eras of art-making from cave paintings to the very contemporary abstract/minimal. However, simply because there are realistically rendered subjects recognisable in most of Song’s work does not make him a realist. Still life subjects or landscapes emerge ghost-like from the background of many of his works, yet the overall composition is predominantly abstract. Song’s use of realism is, I believe, a prime example of contemporary painting as an act of subversion, a challenge, or a rebuttal of what some would say was the conclusion of representational painting marked by the advent of the Malevichian monochrome in the 1960s.

 

 

Song usually paints some ‘thing’

but its hard to make out what that ‘thing’ is

is the ‘thing’ important at all?

 

 

all art is a search for the real

the best way for me to approach this is through

fictional mediation on a flat surface

 

 

On the surface of Song’s painting, or more precisely in the foreground of his works, are almost photographically rendered motifs that appear to a greater or lesser extent across all his canvases. Read by the viewer very much as real one might refer to these motifs as trompe l’oeil in their effect. They are certainly rendered with such a high degree of technical brilliance that these painted elements would easily fool the casual viewer.

 

 

he said his aim is not to fool

he said his work is not ludic

 

 

Art historians often date trompe l'oeil techniques to the Baroque period (when they were most popular) but in fact there are examples from Greek and Roman times. It was Pliny the Elder, a Roman author, naturalist and philosopher, who in his encyclopaedia Naturalis Historia of AD77, first wrote of a painting competition between two artists Zeuxis and Parrhasios that was held to determine whose work was the most realistic / life-like. Parrhasios succeeded by fooling his competitor into trying to part drapes that appeared to cover a painting, when in fact the drapes themselves were part of the painting.

 

For Song, this visual trickery carries with it a slightly wicked sense of humour, a playfulness that is evident in these works and cannot be overlooked. It might not be the artist’s intention, but the effect is to some extent beyond his control. Once an artist has created a work, and released it for public consumption, they have no way of knowing, or controlling, how that work is received. So for Song to mark the surface, to obscure it to some extent, with strips or sections of what appears to be masking tape, so expertly rendered as to draw the viewer to query why the artist has left tape on the surface of what in all other respects is a very beautiful, poetic landscape, for example, is undeniably ludic. Song fools the viewer, who is so easily seduced by the bravura technique of the artist’s highly accomplished trompe l’oeil.

 

 

1964 Lacan

humans are easily seduced

by the idea of things that are hidden

and easily fooled

into believing that something lies beneath

 

 

Paradoxically, for the viewer, while there is a certain child-like joy in the revelation that the tape is not real, that revelation also carries with it a somewhat uncomfortable hint of annoyance at having been fooled in the first place. The other consideration at this particular moment is that once the viewer knows, they cannot un-know. The revelation of the trompe l’oeil is a unique and unrepeatable experience. Therefore in analysing Song’s practice we must question whether the painting, or any of Song’s other paintings in fact, have the same impact on second seeing? There is a certain theatricality to the work on first viewing, the performance of the revelation, or the possible unwitting performativity of the viewer at that moment. However, once the trick is uncovered Song’s works begin to function in a different way – they encourage heuristic investigation, leading the viewer into a deeper, slower appreciation of the inflections and nuances of his work.

 

 

viewers are always attracted by the verisimilitude

by accentuating the sense of the ‘tangible object’, the masking tape

signifies itself relative to the flat canvas (the reality)

 

 

Carl Honoré's 2004 book, In Praise of Slowness, proposes that all aspects of modern life require a specific and appropriate amount of time be dedicated to each as a counterpoint to the continual acceleration we feel at this point in the 21st century. Building on this The Slow Art movement was founded by Terry Phil who, while at the New York Jewish Museum in 2008, had a profound and revelatory experience. Having never looked at an individual work of art for more than a few minutes, Phil realised that the work he had spent considerable time looking at took on an entirely different quality after extended viewing. Phil’s proposition (and now a rapidly developing global trend) is that viewers should take time to consider and appreciate works of art in a conscious and deliberate manner rather than rushing through a gallery in order to take in another exhibition or to get to the bookstore or coffee shop.

 

 

people often pass by my paintings...

they do not, for even a moment, consider

that the ‘tape’ is not tape

 

 

Having seen through the ‘trick-of-the-eye’, the viewer can still marvel at the technique of the artist, but the true fascination comes when the viewer moves beyond this single revelatory moment and begins to ask questions… about abstraction and realism, about the actual and the imaginary, about the dark, shadowy worlds Song paints behind (or under) the surface (window) of the canvas and about what is real, what is true and what is not. In language and much philosophy stretching back to the Greek dramatist Sophocles, there is a clear and indissolvable link between what is seen to be ‘real’ and what is considered ‘true’. When we talk about what is real, we often assume that it is also true… and vice versa. So let’s take it as read that for our purposes these words are interchangeable.

 

So what exactly is ‘real’? In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, a ground-breaking text by Jaques Lacan, first published in 1973, builds on a series of lectures the theorist gave in the 1950s. In this book Lacan investigates the notion of the ‘real’ and considers it as one of three orders: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. Lacan goes to great lengths to articulate the Imaginary and the Symbolic but the Real is relegated to being defined as that which is neither of the other two and, at the same time, it is not to be considered as being simply synonymous with external reality.

 

 

is it important if

the tapes are real or not?

 

 

As Lacan proposed Realism is not simply an empiric representation of reality… it is a representation of reality as mediated through the consciousness, unconsciousness and the skill (technique) of the artist. However, there is a general consensus that for something to be referred to as Realism or realist it should fit a certain generalized view of the subject itself. This notion of a generalised understanding stems from the early work of American pragmatic philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce, who in Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs published in the early 1900s suggested that certain represented objects, that he refers to as ‘icons’ – can be understood with little or no mediation. Certainly it is the case that Song’s images are universal in subject matter and could be read, and understood, in or from most cultural contexts. However, Song makes no attempt to copy the real.

 

 

“…representational painting used up paint rather than

allowing paint to come into being as paint.

Paint is used as an erasive medium to cover the tracks

of the paint’s work.”

Barbara Bolt ‘The Work of Art’, Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image, I.B.Tauris, 2004

 

 

Hal Foster, the American theorist and art historian, in his book The Return of the Real published in 1996 took a critical position in relation to the (historical) avant-garde(s) and contemporary art. Foster considered the notion of ‘art-as-simulacrum’ or re-creation to be of the 1980s and that art practice, since that time, has become about the real, the actual thing, be that the body of the artist, or any other material the artist chooses to work with. Foster’s proposition therefore further complicates Song’s practice. Song’s work is not a simulacrum and neither is it real. In fact nothing seen in Song’s paintings are real.

 

 

“My paintings are all imagined… even the flowers”

Sheauming Song in an email to the author 11 April 2017

 

 

This insight into his practice positions Song’s work apart from most current theories on painting, or at least means his work doesn’t fit wholly into any easy or pre-defined category. There is something unreal, other-worldly; something that has arisen from his imagination, from his subconscious that is made manifest in his work. These images are very personal, perhaps intimate. He himself may not know their origin or be fully aware of what they might mean (if anything). Maybe that is why he seeks to obfuscate the reality (for reality read ‘truth’) of his works through abstraction and through over-painting with textures, drips or ‘masking tape’.

 

 

Song uses ‘masking tape’

‘masking’ to conceal something from view

– that which lies beneath the surface

 

 

Some of the landscapes look faded, misty and ominous; while some of the ‘flower’ subjects (that carry a subtle allusion to Dutch Old Master paintings) are shadowy and unnerving, hinting at decay. Colour is lacking, with the majority of Song’s works being created from a minimal palette of blacks, greys and earthy tones – browns, ochres and blue-greens. Is this some sort of chromaphobia, as defined by the artist David Bachelor in his book of the same title?

 

 

“… colour has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished and degraded. Generations of philosophers, artists, art historians and cultural theorists of one stripe or another have kept this prejudice alive, warm, fed and groomed. As with all prejudices, its manifest form, its loathing, masks a fear: a fear of contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable. This loathing of colour, this fear of corruption through colour, needs a name: chromophobia.”

David Bachelor Chromaphobia, 2000 (Reaktion Books) pp22–23

 

 

Song’s decision to work with a limited palette does not stem from a fear of colour. Some of his earlier works use colour with great confidence and aplomb. So, why the predominance of black and grey in his work? Black, or more precisely the lack of colour, is generally thought to reflect ideas of the primordial void, emptiness; while grey is linked symbolically to the intellect, knowledge and wisdom, all of which reinforces the un-reality of that Song’s works.

 

 

The Greeks considered wisdom

to be the love of the highest things:

“the true, the good and the beautiful.”

the image would be easily recognised by

the accurate arrangement of colour…

monochromatic colour deconstructs the

traditional regulations of (realistic) painting

 

 

Even within this restricted, minimal palette Song’s works are all, without exception beautiful, lyrical and beguiling. The fact that almost every aspect of Song’s work is born from his imagination marks a fundamental contradiction in his practice: they are at once real and unreal, true and untrue and in being so conflate Lacan’s separation of the Imaginary and the Real. This representation of, figuration of, or ‘refiguration’ of the imaginary is what Sebastian Egenhofer, Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Vienna refers to as ‘masking’:

“… masking [is] not the concealment of a pre-existing identity but the construction of an identity without an original.”

Sebastian Egenhofer ‘Figures of Defiguration: Four These on Abstraction’, 2008 in Painting: Documents of Contemporary Art, 2011 (Whitechapel and MIT Press) pp209-2017

‘masking’ as construction of an imagined reality

fits well with Song’s work

 

 

Song’s imagined landscapes and still-life paintings exhibit an insubstantiality as a consequence of this ‘masking’. His imagined places and scenes cannot be more fully rendered as they are from the often ill-defined realm of the unconscious. Song builds on this, emphasising the distance between his abstract imagined realities and the hyperrealism of the masking tape (seemingly) applied to the surfaces of his paintings – confusing the subject–object binary.

 

 

“Is it the depictions we are supposed to attend to, or the surfaces they are painted on…? We might ask why these things have been painted at all.”

Adrian Searle Unbound Possibilities in Painting, Hayward Gallery, 1994

 

 

The above quote from the British art critic and curator Adrian Searle positions a rhetorical question in response to the paintings he included in his 1994 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London. He asks us to consider whether the subject of a painting is actually the thing that demands the viewer’s attention or whether the subject is there simply to draw our attention to the surface of the painting – its materiality and/or the illusion that the artist is attempting to create.

 

 

This proposition is one that was originally put forward by the art critic Clement Greenberg in 1986

“… painters attained autonomy for their medium by eliminating the illusion of depth to reveal the material surface of the flat picture plane.”

Clement Greenberg ‘Towards a Newer Laocoön’ The Collected Essays and Criticism. Ed. John O’Brian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986

 

 

However, Greenberg’s (and therefore Searle’s) questioning is now considered reductivist. The contemporary perspective is that “… no medium has a stable sense or substance” as articulated by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Isabelle Graw in their introduction to Painting Beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-Modern Condition (Sternberg Press 2016). Their suggestion being that painting as a system is unstable and there are likely to be fluctuations of perception between the subject of the painting and the materiality of the work itself – the painting as object and the flatness of the surface. The implication is that for many contemporary painters, while there is a desire to complicate and destabilise meaning and to formalise notions of the medium of painting, the subject always reasserts itself even if only for a fleeting moment.

 

 

painting considered

as the subject of itself

 

 

This is another paradox in the work of Sheauming Song. His fully or partially abstract forms, evident in the background of many of his works, usually carry some sense of visual depth but are in turn masked, literally and metaphorically, by the false-reality of his painted tapes that consequently draw attention to the surface and, in so doing, to the painting as object.

 

 

the intangibility alienates the viewer

from either a realistic or abstract image

visual ambiguity

comes between them

abstract materiality

 

 

When art historians talk about the surface and the flatness of paintings they often reference the work of the American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock, whose drips and splatters avoided any clear point of focus thus forcing the viewer to consider his paintings as a whole – as one singularity (a flat surface). For Song this is

not the case at all, even when his ‘background’ subject matter is entirely abstract (say a texture) he still paints fragments of tape on the surface which catch and confuse the eye creating even more of a fluctuation between surface and background, the subject of painting and the inverse: the painting as subject. His works are formed of an abstract ground with the surface identified by the false-reality of the tape motifs… inverting or at least challenging the idea of flatness in abstract art.

 

“… Western painting since the Renaissance had conceptualised the picture as the ‘window on the world’, modernism’s abstraction represented an iconoclastic movement, in so far as in the reduction to ‘pure’ surfaces the model of representation itself was negated up to the point where the materiality of the work claimed an autonomous presence for itself.”

 

Sebastian Egenhofer ‘Figures of Defiguration: Four These on Abstraction’ 2008 in Painting; Documents of Contemporary Art Ed. Terry R. Myers, Whitechapel and MIT Press 2011

 

 

In some of Song’s earlier works, for example Too Much, 2006 and Dawn, 2007, the false tapes extend in strips, barrier-like, across the entire painting surface… as if they are holding the surface of the painting in place or holding the subject (the thing Lacan refers to as ‘that which lies beneath’) back from breaking through the picture plane. The notion of something ‘breaking through’ the surface of a work of art is most often referenced in relation to photography and was first articulated by the French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes in 1980. The principle however, can equally be applied to paintings.

 

Barthes proposes that there are certain subjects – images – that can have a direct and immediate impact on the viewer. The impact of the image Barthes refers to as the punctum – that which ‘punches through’ the image plane with a wounding, emotionally affecting detail, that establishes a direct relationship between viewer and object (work of art) or subject (image that is being represented). Could Song’s ‘binding’ tapes be placed there to reinforce the surface, to contain any perceived sentimentality or nostalgia, or restrain any ‘feeling’ that might be at risk of punching through the picture plane?

 

 

If we take the position of the un-knowing viewer, then leaving tape on a painting’s surface might be considered an oversight, an unfortunately mistake or an accident that took place during the wrapping or unpacking of the work. One wonders, therefore, why the tape is still there when the painting is on display… perhaps removing the tape after the fact might remove some of the painted surface. So why display the painting in this state? Surely the artist and curators would prefer to show an undamaged work? Whether the tapes are real or not the artist’s intention seems to be to interfere with the subject matter beneath, playing with the notion of the primacy of the painterly surface. Possibly his intention is to be disruptive – perhaps even undermining any initial attempt at assigning fiscal value to the work. Maybe it is an auto-destructive moment, after all it is not without precedent that an artist should create and at the same time wish to destroy his work. The Spanish

painter Joan Miró is often reported to have said that he wanted to “to assassinate painting” altogether.

 

 

John Ashbery Self Portrait as a Convex Mirror, 1990

“… your eyes proclaim

that everything is surface. The surface is what's there

and nothing can exist except what's there.”

 

 

In her text titled Surface, 2002 Christa Noel Robbins from the University of Virginia, USA states that “… ‘surface’ cannot help but summon up what lies beneath it – it's a contingent word, inseparable from its opposite”. Thus, in thinking about what Song does to the surface of his paintings, the viewer cannot help but think about what lies beneath the artist’s ‘false’ gestures on, or toward, the surface.

 

 

painterly unmaking

 

To some extent – having created a detailed, abstract, expressionistic painting – itself of considerable quality and meaning (and thus inherent value), Song seeks to destroy the painting, as well as the artifice of the painterly surface, by appearing to apply fragments of tape or sometimes several long strips of tape, to the surface. He paints the faux tapes, with painstaking carelessness, with the intention of un-making the painting that lies beneath.

 

“In a deeper sense, the image of the random,

the changing, the impermanent and unstable seemed

closer to the experienced qualities of present-day reality…”

Linda Nochlin ‘The Nature of Realism’ Realism (Penguin Style and Civilisation series) 1990

is this some sort of

anti-neoliberalist instinct?

 

The art historian and theorist Yves Alan Bois has said that painting after Duchamp and more so in the post-internet age has became unnecessary and that painting now is purely a means of satisfying the neoliberal art market. The current prediction on the future death of painting therefore links it with its drift into commodity culture (a contributing factor in the acceleration of global neoliberalism), the rise of the indexical image and the redrafting of the work yet again as the (Baudrillardian) simulacrum.

 

Song’s work resists this.

 

Sheauming Song is a radical, contrary and defiantly avant-garde in his practice. While others are abandoning painting or diversifying their practice, Song is deeply committed to exploring, and exposing, his chosen medium and at the same time, seeks to destabilise and subvert it. His work has a place in the art market, but this is not of primary importance to him. He makes highly technical, sophisticated paintings only to disrupt the work with fragments of (fake) masking tape.

 

Just the idea alone of removing the ‘tapes’ or unmasking destroys the painting. Unmasking would reveal the truth that lies beneath the painting. Unmasking would be anti-abstract and stabilise the age-old fiction of something beyond the picture plane. Unmasking would threaten the viewer with an emotional engagement with a subject that is neither real nor abstract. Unmasking for Song is a way of un-making his works.

 

When you unmask Song’s work you reveal one paradox after another.

Sheauming Song is an un-realist who un-makes paintings.

Adrian George

Associate Director, Exhibitions

ArtScience Museum, Singapore

Deputy Director of Government Art Collection

Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (dcms), U.K