Li Songsong 李松松

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Li Songsong is a Chinese oil painter whose large scale canvasses recreate public source images of modern Chinese history in a painterly and expressionistic style. Born in 1973, Li lives and works in Beijing.

Date & Place of Birth

Li was born in 1973 in Beijing, China.

Education & Development

In 1992, Li graduated from the Subsidiary School of Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. In 1996, he received his Bachelor's Degree from the Department of Oil Painting at CAFA.

Art

Li Songsong is a historical painter. Pictures from magazines, film clips, photographs of historical events--all images from the public realm--form the source of his work. Li records moments of recent Chinese history in a dispassionate manner that is countered by the way in which he manipulates the painted surface with a vigorous impasto of paint marks on aluminium panels.

His paintings are constructed in rectangular sections with each portion painted separately. By juxtaposing these segments, Li concentrates formally on parts of the painting, rather than the whole. In choosing historical scenes and events that range from the time of China’s revolutionary war to the founding of the PRC, he has utilised photographs of historical moments during the Cultural Revolution and images, readily recognizable to the Chinese as icons of the seat of power, such as the Conference Assembly Room or the Dome of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Li’s approach to his subject matter is one of the dispassionate chronicler. He offers no particular point of view or overt critique of his subjects but rather, in the manner of an archivist, presents the viewer with an image that he has studied in detail before rendering.^[1]