Personal memories in the depth seem to emerge from the painted surface, enveloping viewers in the feeling of tranquility and the atmosphere of lyric, creating a resonance within their heart.
Concrete Poetry from SONG Sheau-Ming Written by Christopher Cook
Sheauming Song consciously playing down his irreverent delight in subversive realist representation in favour of a closer relationship between what was previously the ‘underlying’ image and the surface illusion. The significant change is partly due to the minimalist genre Song examines, which has the effect of reducing the level of irony in favour of a subtler dialogue.
Christopher Cook (Professor of Painting, and Gallery Curator, University of Plymouth)
The arresting elegance of these recent paintings by Sheauming Song is both visual and conceptual. In their stark simplicity and veneration of material qualities, the paintings delight the eye, but on closer acquaintance a philosophical intensity arises to give the works their distinctive presence.
Song’s philosophical inquiry has been nurtured by many years of contemplative searching in the studio, trying out new possibilities for contemporary painting, and may also be traced back to his doctoral research at Lancaster University in the UK (completed some fifteen years ago) during which time he assessed the continuing relevance of contemporary realist painting. His desire to consider, through theory and practice, the cultural position that painting finds itself in (along with a discipline-specific dialogue between materiality and illusion) tackles a loftier subject: that of perception and the human condition.
It was perhaps natural that Song headed for the UK to undertake his doctorate, for British universities were some of the first to validate high-level theoretical research in creative subjects. The fact that Fine Art as a subject area is now firmly established within academia worldwide owes much to the ground-breaking critical analysis of Clement Greenberg in 1950s New York. Artists of that period championed by Greenberg, such as Barnet Newman, brought a reflective philosophical intensity to the discipline that encouraged colleges of art, and later universities, to adapt Gropius’s Bauhaus model and fully embrace it as an academic discipline.
Yet for a painter with strong academic credentials, Sheauming Song remains grounded both by the landscape that he regularly and extensively explores, and through consistent, focussed practice in the studio. An inquisitive, philosophical approach demands his work to be both serious and also experimental, which means it must also sometimes be playful, irreverent, and anarchic. That his everyday studio materials have become his subject matter is precisely because they are the malleable tools of his visual philosophy, just as common words challenge the poet to transform the familiar into a means of eloquent expression and communication. From this grounding in the ‘concrete’ - often also used as a synonym for ‘real’ or ‘actual’ - arises the lean poetry of Song’s images.
The exhibition title, Concrete Poetry, is appropriated from a literary movement which, like Abstract Expressionism, gained traction in the 1950s. It prioritised the visual effect of words over literal meaning (it was also known as ‘visual poetry’) and so sought to expand the conceptual ambit of language, just as Song is concerned with expanding painterly range. The title more importantly recognises in these works a telling conjunction of the aesthetic and intellectual, with the concrete realities of studio life: raw linen, earth pigments, blank-white ‘primer’ and masking tape - in fictional form.
The masking tape signifies process, and reminds the viewer that all art is an illusion, an image in transition, its unpredictability or uncertainty a magical property. As Song himself has declared: “Different potentialities and uncertainties of being an artwork are latent. By representing an image of indefinite status as an end image, such uncertainties are established in an unsettling way, are never fixed, and become a process of seeing and thinking about that image… but also anticipate the viewer’s imaginative participation in terms of the ‘incompleteness’ of my depiction.”
Greenberg espoused the concept of ‘medium specificity’, asserting that there are inherent qualities particular to each artistic medium. In the case of painting, he declared that the two-dimensional nature of canvas and pigment demanded an increased emphasis on flatness, rather than the illusion of depth and perspective that had fascinated painters since the innovations of Alberti and other artists of the Renaissance. Song extends the Greenbergian debate by making the viewer very aware of the painted object, then problematising that awareness through deft illusion of masking tape, which conjures a miniscule amount of space above the picture plane. This in turn draws even more attention to the surface. Although the tape is a repeated rhetorical device, his inquiry into the nature of perception and the human imagination is rigorous in the way that other aspects are brought into the discussion: the overlapping and layering of paint, formal juxtaposition, the use of canvas edges and sides, and inventive spatial arrangement.
The realism we find in these paintings, in the rendition of the tape, has connections to the French realist movement of the mid-nineteenth century, but in temperament is more closely aligned with the hyperrealism of Dutch 17th century Still Life painting, in the works of artists such as van Hoogstraten and Evert Calier, (renamed Collier after his move to London). Collier’s 1699 work, A Trompe l’Oeil of Newspapers, Letters and Writing Implements on a Wooden Board, is an updating of the memento mori genre of the time, the virtuoso trompe l’oeil of the papers and letters augmented by the inclusion of the leather strap which seems to hold them. The arrival of photography inevitably altered the status of trompe l’oeil, but the potential for painting to deploy extremes of artifice remained. German painter Gerhard Richter, whom Song has long been an admirer of, used it in a novel way by blurring or smudging his painted imagery to deliver a more ‘documentary’ (or ‘mediated’) flavour, even though he was in fact erasing detail.
Song’s masking tape trompe is also a trope - used repeatedly for emphasis, and to avoid it being seen as ‘special’ to an individual image. Yet in each sequence of works – from earlier flower still life works (citing Richter) to the landscapes, to these current abstract works, the implication of the trope registers as profoundly different. On the flower paintings, the tape perhaps invokes the academic meticulousness of William Coldstream and his measured observational method, as if the tape were part of that process, marking key reference points to establish composition and relational scale. In Song’s Intertidal landscape works of 2020, the pictorial mood infers the sublime of Edmund Burke, but the tape is ‘applied’ in a provocative manner, attached to the surface as though unwanted leftover, perhaps from the unwrapping of the work for exhibition. This overlay of masking tape forces the viewer to maintain a certain distance and warns against being drawn into the romantic atmospherics. At times the tape has a force almost as stark as Fontana’s slashing of the canvas to destroy the picture plane.
The body of work in Concrete Poetry honours the minimalist reaction to the painterly abstraction of artists such as Pollock and De Kooning, a reaction initiated by the 1959 exhibition of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings at MOMA. The move to minimalism brings with it a more serious mood, in which the tape is not so willing to play provocateur, but instead contemplates becoming a genuine participant. Because it is implicated in the formal construction of the image itself, in the production of the straight edges, the illusory tape here wants to belong, and whilst this may be said of specific previous images, in this body of work it gives rise to powerful ‘authentic’ themes, as if undeterred by the irony that Song so appreciates.
Greenberg was an inspiration for ‘painterly abstraction’ in his assertion that “realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art” but he was also integral to the minimalist conversion, a movement that gained global recognition through the works of Agnes Martin, Robert Morris and Greenberg’s prime example, Barnet Newman. Song resists comparisons with Newman, for even though masking tape is a common fascination, “the intention is completely different” he insists. There is no cause to doubt his assertion, but Newman’s interest in philosophy, and his inclination to constantly reflect on his paintings, suggests some parallels, as does Greenberg’s assertion that Newman is “not concerned to demonstrate how well he can draw shade or line – the truth lies…beyond what he knows he can do”, which is also very true of Sheauming Song. Perhaps even more telling is British critic David Sylvester’s observation on Newman: “it’s a sure sign that an artist matters when antithetical statements about him seem equally convincing”.
Newman began as a surrealist, but rapidly pared back his language to deal with a painting’s essentials: scale, structure, surface, gesture. His flat surfaces are usually divided and activated by a vertical line, or ‘zip’ as they became known, made using masking tape. His White Fire from 1960 is a memorable example, in which a flicker of brushwork in black paint appears either side of a line that implicitly evokes the masking tape employed in its making. Yet the connection to Sheauming Song’s paintings is less one of visual resonance than of philosophical standpoint, as suggested by Newman’s declaration, "I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality and the same time of his connection to others, who are also separate”.
This idea of separateness emerges is picked up in this exhibition in Song’s astute use of the diptych and polyptych form, and the small gaps he insists upon within them. Separateness is also developed as a potent theme in itself to evoke notions of repair, unity, and healing in these divisive times. In Between, the paint handling recalls the minimalist approach of Newman (though the angled horizontal gap is a long way from a zip) but crucially, the illusion of masking tape here appears to hold the two slabs of colour together as they threaten to slide apart, thus suggesting a kind of stitch. Is this a glimpse of the disjuncture between surface and image beginning to concede to more emotive metaphors? In the vertical diptych Juli, (which in Mandarin implies “to be apart”) the masking tape exudes bathos, as if an attempt to hold the canvasses together has ultimately proved in vain. And whilst Error would seem to be self-explanatory (there seems to have been some slippage in the composition, as if we are witnessing the reassembling of pieces of a larger work, like fragments of an ancient vase that no longer quite fit) the act of healing is also implicit, and the tape may again reference a physical attachment or suture.
The Lovers diptych is a key work in this exhibition in the way it elucidates the artist’s thinking behind the masking tape illusion. Where the two canvasses meet, and we imagine from the title this is a meeting of minds and bodies, there is a subtle mismatch, to indicate the diverse yet entangled individuals that encounter each other. The concrete greys are sublimely, intimately soft. Distinct beings approach each other respectfully, with tenderness. Yet each of the two independent canvasses, hung with a few millimetres gap between them, has a small piece of illusionistic masking tape at its very outer edge, where the painting interacts with the display wall. The subtle insertion of tape is not here designed to cause the viewer a visual disturbance, but instead appears to signify where the two individuals remain unfinished, contingent, open to experience, curious about the world. Where they near-meet as lovers nothing is in doubt, but the two small sections of carefully rendered tape generate the requisite uncertainty, and sense of openness.
In the polyptych Xuyu, pieces of tape echo the flatly painted angled shapes on each panel. Song habitually resists attempts to associate his work with Eastern aesthetic influences, and such interpretations may indeed present a form of cultural confirmation bias, hence to suggest that the four-panel format of Xuyu recalls ancient Chinese or Japanese painting on screens seems presumptious. There is a hidden circularity in such attributions however, for numerous painters of the ‘50s New York scene were influenced by the Zen Buddhist teachings of Daisetz Suzuki, prefiguring the absorption of Eastern philosophy into minimalist ‘Western’ aesthetics. Each panel of Xuyu has just one painted triangle and one piece of tape, in a form of dance, and potentially a sublimated empty/full or yin/yang relationship, where yin might be, for example, the settled and permanent (carefully painted onto the fabric) whilst the tape is the yang, the contingent, dynamic, symbolic of impermanence – ironically made permanent. Song has previously declared: ‘I would rather consider the masking tape as being a threshold or gateway to understanding what is represented”, and what makes the screen reading more compelling is that this dualistic dance or interplay across the four sections has the elegance of a courtly game, perhaps reflecting the intimacy of a screened bedroom. Is this pared-down sequence of formal elements also an oblique cypher for lovers, inextricably linked, yet also separate?
The title of Metaphor is provocative – challenging the viewer to work out what metaphor is intended. The calm minimalism of the upper section is predicated upon a ‘process of becoming’ at the base, which is reminiscent of a ‘style sheet’ or colour sampler, in which actual masking tape has been repeatedly used to allow the artist to test a variety of possible tones, colours, angles and rhythms. This intricate substructure is the foundation on which the concrete statement – and the playful tapes - of the upper section depends, suggesting that the key metaphor is for the act of creation itself, creation not as sudden enlightenment, but a process of testing and of resolving.
The change in this latest body of work is partly as a consequence of the minimalist genre Sheauming Song is questioning, and of course, from the artists perspective, the strategy could be to provide another ‘credible vehicle’ that will generate a palpable frisson once the skill, the slight-of-hand, is registered. Past evidence points to Song consistently moving from one challenge to a new one, keeping himself on his toes, as it were, to remain philosophically nimble. In his earlier Intertidal landscapes the irony of the tape addition is unmistakeable, but in this exhibition the irony is on the point of collapsing into meaning, and into new themes. The evocations of masking tape in Concrete Poetry integrate more readily because they connect with the values the paintings depend upon: flat shapes, neat edges, and straight lines. Even as it tips a wink at the viewer, the tape becomes an activated ingredient of the abstract conversation. These works become doubly important precisely because the tension between image and tape has abated in favour of dialogue and détente, and the tape wishes to belong because the artist wishes to approach urgent new themes.
As noted earlier, an extensive skein of theory has been spun around the work of Sheauming Song, not least by the artist himself, and justly so, for his works are intellectually engaging and conceptually rich. Yet it is important to return to the visual and visceral experience of the individual works themselves, when theoretical underpinnings and intellectual provocations fall away, and the viewer encounters the concrete poetry of the object ‘in person,’ as though meeting a lover. In this encounter the sense of elegant poise, of tender healing, is foremost, and is enhanced rather than undermined by illusion. The exhibition captures Sheauming Song consciously playing down his irreverent delight in subversive realist representation in favour of a closer relationship between what was previously the ‘underlying’ image and the surface illusion. The significant change is partly due to the minimalist genre Song examines, which has the effect of reducing the level of irony in favour of a subtler dialogue. Perhaps more surprisingly, from within the philosophical rigour, the change has allowed authentic themes of healing and of resolution to emerge, to give these works a newfound intimacy.
Concrete Poetry from SONG Sheau-Ming Written by Christopher Cook
The arresting elegance of these recent paintings by Sheauming Song is both visual and conceptual. In their stark simplicity and veneration of material qualities, the paintings delight the eye, but on closer acquaintance a philosophical intensity arises to give the works their distinctive presence.
Song’s philosophical inquiry has been nurtured by many years of contemplative searching in the studio, trying out new possibilities for contemporary painting, and may also be traced back to his doctoral research at Lancaster University in the UK (completed some fifteen years ago) during which time he assessed the continuing relevance of contemporary realist painting. His desire to consider, through theory and practice, the cultural position that painting finds itself in (along with a discipline-specific dialogue between materiality and illusion) tackles a loftier subject: that of perception and the human condition.
It was perhaps natural that Song headed for the UK to undertake his doctorate, for British universities were some of the first to validate high-level theoretical research in creative subjects. The fact that Fine Art as a subject area is now firmly established within academia worldwide owes much to the ground-breaking critical analysis of Clement Greenberg in 1950s New York. Artists of that period championed by Greenberg, such as Barnet Newman, brought a reflective philosophical intensity to the discipline that encouraged colleges of art, and later universities, to adapt Gropius’s Bauhaus model and fully embrace it as an academic discipline.
Yet for a painter with strong academic credentials, Sheauming Song remains grounded both by the landscape that he regularly and extensively explores, and through consistent, focussed practice in the studio. An inquisitive, philosophical approach demands his work to be both serious and also experimental, which means it must also sometimes be playful, irreverent, and anarchic. That his everyday studio materials have become his subject matter is precisely because they are the malleable tools of his visual philosophy, just as common words challenge the poet to transform the familiar into a means of eloquent expression and communication. From this grounding in the ‘concrete’ - often also used as a synonym for ‘real’ or ‘actual’ - arises the lean poetry of Song’s images.
The exhibition title, Concrete Poetry, is appropriated from a literary movement which, like Abstract Expressionism, gained traction in the 1950s. It prioritised the visual effect of words over literal meaning (it was also known as ‘visual poetry’) and so sought to expand the conceptual ambit of language, just as Song is concerned with expanding painterly range. The title more importantly recognises in these works a telling conjunction of the aesthetic and intellectual, with the concrete realities of studio life: raw linen, earth pigments, blank-white ‘primer’ and masking tape - in fictional form.
The masking tape signifies process, and reminds the viewer that all art is an illusion, an image in transition, its unpredictability or uncertainty a magical property. As Song himself has declared: “Different potentialities and uncertainties of being an artwork are latent. By representing an image of indefinite status as an end image, such uncertainties are established in an unsettling way, are never fixed, and become a process of seeing and thinking about that image… but also anticipate the viewer’s imaginative participation in terms of the ‘incompleteness’ of my depiction.”
Greenberg espoused the concept of ‘medium specificity’, asserting that there are inherent qualities particular to each artistic medium. In the case of painting, he declared that the two-dimensional nature of canvas and pigment demanded an increased emphasis on flatness, rather than the illusion of depth and perspective that had fascinated painters since the innovations of Alberti and other artists of the Renaissance. Song extends the Greenbergian debate by making the viewer very aware of the painted object, then problematising that awareness through deft illusion of masking tape, which conjures a miniscule amount of space above the picture plane. This in turn draws even more attention to the surface. Although the tape is a repeated rhetorical device, his inquiry into the nature of perception and the human imagination is rigorous in the way that other aspects are brought into the discussion: the overlapping and layering of paint, formal juxtaposition, the use of canvas edges and sides, and inventive spatial arrangement.
The realism we find in these paintings, in the rendition of the tape, has connections to the French realist movement of the mid-nineteenth century, but in temperament is more closely aligned with the hyperrealism of Dutch 17th century Still Life painting, in the works of artists such as van Hoogstraten and Evert Calier, (renamed Collier after his move to London). Collier’s 1699 work, A Trompe l’Oeil of Newspapers, Letters and Writing Implements on a Wooden Board, is an updating of the memento mori genre of the time, the virtuoso trompe l’oeil of the papers and letters augmented by the inclusion of the leather strap which seems to hold them. The arrival of photography inevitably altered the status of trompe l’oeil, but the potential for painting to deploy extremes of artifice remained. German painter Gerhard Richter, whom Song has long been an admirer of, used it in a novel way by blurring or smudging his painted imagery to deliver a more ‘documentary’ (or ‘mediated’) flavour, even though he was in fact erasing detail.
Song’s masking tape trompe is also a trope - used repeatedly for emphasis, and to avoid it being seen as ‘special’ to an individual image. Yet in each sequence of works – from earlier flower still life works (citing Richter) to the landscapes, to these current abstract works, the implication of the trope registers as profoundly different. On the flower paintings, the tape perhaps invokes the academic meticulousness of William Coldstream and his measured observational method, as if the tape were part of that process, marking key reference points to establish composition and relational scale. In Song’s Intertidal landscape works of 2020, the pictorial mood infers the sublime of Edmund Burke, but the tape is ‘applied’ in a provocative manner, attached to the surface as though unwanted leftover, perhaps from the unwrapping of the work for exhibition. This overlay of masking tape forces the viewer to maintain a certain distance and warns against being drawn into the romantic atmospherics. At times the tape has a force almost as stark as Fontana’s slashing of the canvas to destroy the picture plane.
The body of work in Concrete Poetry honours the minimalist reaction to the painterly abstraction of artists such as Pollock and De Kooning, a reaction initiated by the 1959 exhibition of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings at MOMA. The move to minimalism brings with it a more serious mood, in which the tape is not so willing to play provocateur, but instead contemplates becoming a genuine participant. Because it is implicated in the formal construction of the image itself, in the production of the straight edges, the illusory tape here wants to belong, and whilst this may be said of specific previous images, in this body of work it gives rise to powerful ‘authentic’ themes, as if undeterred by the irony that Song so appreciates.
Greenberg was an inspiration for ‘painterly abstraction’ in his assertion that “realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art” but he was also integral to the minimalist conversion, a movement that gained global recognition through the works of Agnes Martin, Robert Morris and Greenberg’s prime example, Barnet Newman. Song resists comparisons with Newman, for even though masking tape is a common fascination, “the intention is completely different” he insists. There is no cause to doubt his assertion, but Newman’s interest in philosophy, and his inclination to constantly reflect on his paintings, suggests some parallels, as does Greenberg’s assertion that Newman is “not concerned to demonstrate how well he can draw shade or line – the truth lies…beyond what he knows he can do”, which is also very true of Sheauming Song. Perhaps even more telling is British critic David Sylvester’s observation on Newman: “it’s a sure sign that an artist matters when antithetical statements about him seem equally convincing”.
Newman began as a surrealist, but rapidly pared back his language to deal with a painting’s essentials: scale, structure, surface, gesture. His flat surfaces are usually divided and activated by a vertical line, or ‘zip’ as they became known, made using masking tape. His White Fire from 1960 is a memorable example, in which a flicker of brushwork in black paint appears either side of a line that implicitly evokes the masking tape employed in its making. Yet the connection to Sheauming Song’s paintings is less one of visual resonance than of philosophical standpoint, as suggested by Newman’s declaration, "I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality and the same time of his connection to others, who are also separate”.
This idea of separateness emerges is picked up in this exhibition in Song’s astute use of the diptych and polyptych form, and the small gaps he insists upon within them. Separateness is also developed as a potent theme in itself to evoke notions of repair, unity, and healing in these divisive times. In Between, the paint handling recalls the minimalist approach of Newman (though the angled horizontal gap is a long way from a zip) but crucially, the illusion of masking tape here appears to hold the two slabs of colour together as they threaten to slide apart, thus suggesting a kind of stitch. Is this a glimpse of the disjuncture between surface and image beginning to concede to more emotive metaphors? In the vertical diptych Juli, (which in Mandarin implies “to be apart”) the masking tape exudes bathos, as if an attempt to hold the canvasses together has ultimately proved in vain. And whilst Error would seem to be self-explanatory (there seems to have been some slippage in the composition, as if we are witnessing the reassembling of pieces of a larger work, like fragments of an ancient vase that no longer quite fit) the act of healing is also implicit, and the tape may again reference a physical attachment or suture.
The Lovers diptych is a key work in this exhibition in the way it elucidates the artist’s thinking behind the masking tape illusion. Where the two canvasses meet, and we imagine from the title this is a meeting of minds and bodies, there is a subtle mismatch, to indicate the diverse yet entangled individuals that encounter each other. The concrete greys are sublimely, intimately soft. Distinct beings approach each other respectfully, with tenderness. Yet each of the two independent canvasses, hung with a few millimetres gap between them, has a small piece of illusionistic masking tape at its very outer edge, where the painting interacts with the display wall. The subtle insertion of tape is not here designed to cause the viewer a visual disturbance, but instead appears to signify where the two individuals remain unfinished, contingent, open to experience, curious about the world. Where they near-meet as lovers nothing is in doubt, but the two small sections of carefully rendered tape generate the requisite uncertainty, and sense of openness.
In the polyptych Xuyu, pieces of tape echo the flatly painted angled shapes on each panel. Song habitually resists attempts to associate his work with Eastern aesthetic influences, and such interpretations may indeed present a form of cultural confirmation bias, hence to suggest that the four-panel format of Xuyu recalls ancient Chinese or Japanese painting on screens seems presumptious. There is a hidden circularity in such attributions however, for numerous painters of the ‘50s New York scene were influenced by the Zen Buddhist teachings of Daisetz Suzuki, prefiguring the absorption of Eastern philosophy into minimalist ‘Western’ aesthetics. Each panel of Xuyu has just one painted triangle and one piece of tape, in a form of dance, and potentially a sublimated empty/full or yin/yang relationship, where yin might be, for example, the settled and permanent (carefully painted onto the fabric) whilst the tape is the yang, the contingent, dynamic, symbolic of impermanence – ironically made permanent. Song has previously declared: ‘I would rather consider the masking tape as being a threshold or gateway to understanding what is represented”, and what makes the screen reading more compelling is that this dualistic dance or interplay across the four sections has the elegance of a courtly game, perhaps reflecting the intimacy of a screened bedroom. Is this pared-down sequence of formal elements also an oblique cypher for lovers, inextricably linked, yet also separate?
The title of Metaphor is provocative – challenging the viewer to work out what metaphor is intended. The calm minimalism of the upper section is predicated upon a ‘process of becoming’ at the base, which is reminiscent of a ‘style sheet’ or colour sampler, in which actual masking tape has been repeatedly used to allow the artist to test a variety of possible tones, colours, angles and rhythms. This intricate substructure is the foundation on which the concrete statement – and the playful tapes - of the upper section depends, suggesting that the key metaphor is for the act of creation itself, creation not as sudden enlightenment, but a process of testing and of resolving.
The change in this latest body of work is partly as a consequence of the minimalist genre Sheauming Song is questioning, and of course, from the artists perspective, the strategy could be to provide another ‘credible vehicle’ that will generate a palpable frisson once the skill, the slight-of-hand, is registered. Past evidence points to Song consistently moving from one challenge to a new one, keeping himself on his toes, as it were, to remain philosophically nimble. In his earlier Intertidal landscapes the irony of the tape addition is unmistakeable, but in this exhibition the irony is on the point of collapsing into meaning, and into new themes. The evocations of masking tape in Concrete Poetry integrate more readily because they connect with the values the paintings depend upon: flat shapes, neat edges, and straight lines. Even as it tips a wink at the viewer, the tape becomes an activated ingredient of the abstract conversation. These works become doubly important precisely because the tension between image and tape has abated in favour of dialogue and détente, and the tape wishes to belong because the artist wishes to approach urgent new themes.
As noted earlier, an extensive skein of theory has been spun around the work of Sheauming Song, not least by the artist himself, and justly so, for his works are intellectually engaging and conceptually rich. Yet it is important to return to the visual and visceral experience of the individual works themselves, when theoretical underpinnings and intellectual provocations fall away, and the viewer encounters the concrete poetry of the object ‘in person,’ as though meeting a lover. In this encounter the sense of elegant poise, of tender healing, is foremost, and is enhanced rather than undermined by illusion. The exhibition captures Sheauming Song consciously playing down his irreverent delight in subversive realist representation in favour of a closer relationship between what was previously the ‘underlying’ image and the surface illusion. The significant change is partly due to the minimalist genre Song examines, which has the effect of reducing the level of irony in favour of a subtler dialogue. Perhaps more surprisingly, from within the philosophical rigour, the change has allowed authentic themes of healing and of resolution to emerge, to give these works a newfound intimacy.
Christopher Cook
November 2022