Group Exhibition Song Art Center, Beijing
Song Art Cente is pleased to announce that it will once again collaborate with Madein Gallery to launch the grand opening exhibition of 2025, "Perpetual Motion", on January 4th. The exhibition is produced by Ms. Su Mang, Director of Song Art Center, and proudly features 12 artists: Chen Ying, Li Hanwei, Liu Wa, Lu Pingyuan, Shang Liang, Shao Fengtian, Song Ling, Wang Jianwei, Wang Xin, Wang Ziquan, Xu Zhen, and Yang Yang.
The exhibition presents the artists' immediate reflections and profound reflections in the digital age. The theme, "Perpetual Motion," resonates with Song's long-held principle of "Long-termism in Art." In an era where reality and virtuality intertwine, how are our emotions and consciousness being reshaped at this very moment? Song Art Center will inaugurate the new artistic chapter of 2025 with the exhibition "Perpetual Motion," and looks forward to journeying with all art lovers towards a flourishing spring of art.
Song Art Center once again joins hands with Madein Gallery to present "Perpetual Motion," the grand opening exhibition of 2025, featuring paintings, works on paper, and mixed-media pieces by twelve artists: Chen Ying, Li Hanwei, Liu Wa, Lu Pingyuan, Shang Liang, Shao Fengtian, Song Ling, Wang Jianwei, Wang Xin, Wang Ziquan, Xu Zhen, and Yang Yang. Centered on the theme of "Perpetual Motion," the exhibition calls attention to the long-term commitment in art—a driving force that reflects each artist's dedication to their practice and the vitality within it.
The works on view span a wide spectrum: from meditations on cross-epochal symbiosis among living beings to speculative engagements with AI; from natural ecologies to industrial and digital ecosystems; from the embodied traces of cultural heritage to moments of psychological tremor—each converging into forms of the present. These creations respond to the rapid, disposable nature of consumerism and its impact on collective human existence, affirming the validity of conflict as fuel for perpetual thought—and, in turn, sustenance for the artists.
Lu Pingyuan and Song Ling emphasize the re-assignment of meaning, a process through which the concept of "life" is re-examined. In his Black Nature series, Lu borrows the artist persona of Barbabeau from the classic French animated series Barbapapa to explore the transformation from object to living being, pointing out humanity's habitual reliance on "aliveness" as a criterion for recognition. Song Ling’s paintings shift our perspective on the familiar. Whether dissolving and alienating cold surgical tools or, during the pandemic, merging cross-sections of fruits and vegetables with anatomical structures, the artist reflects on old orders of life by granting things new forms of existence.
Bodily perception and alienation also lie at the heart of several works. Shang Liang’s Righteous Dudes series stems from imaginings and desires for strength and the perfect body. The surreal, exaggerated musculature evolves to near-absurdity, becoming an independent entity detached from bodily control. Wang Xin depicts bodies in floating, dispersed states. Particles composing the figure coalesce or drift apart, illustrating the fluid interchange between life, death, desire, and rebirth.
Liu Wa and Wang Jianwei focus on states of multi-species coexistence. In her practice, Liu seeks to capture the living realities of diverse organisms under human influence. By stripping away human agency and subjectivity, unfamiliar viewpoints construct scenes of a post-natural world. Wang Jianwei, on the other hand, emphasizes the dimension of time, compressing millennia of evolutionary processes into a flattened instant and magnifying the “fluctuating” state of all existence to underscore its temporality and ambiguity. Yang Yang’s abstract paintings share a similar aesthetic of “coexistence,” yet her approach is collagistic, bringing together different civilizations originating from the same natural terrain. Various abstract elements—each belonging to distinct cultural contexts—are assembled, causing originally clear visual symbols to blur and give rise to new crystalline forms of civilization.
Transformations in production tools driven by technological development also provoke artists to reflect on the dialectic between change and permanence, resulting in artworks that behave as organic life. Xu Zhen’s Passion series draws from our daily use of social media. Individuals toggle between different versions of the self; emotions, whether restrained or exuberant, are shaped by the interface designs of the platforms. The familiar gray-and-green chat bubbles against white backgrounds convey the fluid emotional states flowing through online conversations.
Shao Fengtian adopts a skeptical stance toward the privileged position of the artist as observer and interpreter of the world. He employs AI to process images of everyday objects, simulating the fragmented ways contemporary audiences consume information.
Chen Ying’s Gray series similarly derives from the visual experience of the hyper-industrial age. The smooth, vivid, flat aesthetics ubiquitous in the digital era are appropriated into painting, where the artist’s control and editorial decisions heighten the tension inherent in the medium.
Li Hanwei parasites and hacks into the communication channels of today’s consumer society. In his recent Witness series, the artist uses cutting-edge information processing technologies to generate images. These technologies appear to expand the boundaries of human perception, yet conceal numerous limitations and “loopholes.” Li reveals technology’s deep intervention in human life, while also reflecting on the futility and absurdity of our struggle to transcend our own limits—like trying to lift ourselves off the ground by our own hair.
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