Song Jing

ARTIST STATEMENT

As a female individual with a Chinese background immersing herself in European culture and philosophy, I had to deal with numerous questions of identity. My early art works revolved around sameness, identically, and difference among individuals of a given society.

Exploring the poles of the collective and the individual, as well as their interrelation with history, shifted my focus to a range of issues concerning awareness, physicality and emotions. I developed a psycho-archeological method of artistic exploration that led me to conclude emotions are not limited to the body of human beings. History does not exist in a vacuum; events and spoken words penetrate their environment, leaving behind echoes, marks, scars, memories in human beings, landscapes, objects – meaning emotions have to be attributed to these corpo-realities as well. 

Many of my works show how I detect emotional patterns in my environment and project them on chosen objects. The artefacts resulting from the amalgamation of the projected and disembodied feelings with the chosen objects become visible manifestations of inner landscapes of emotions.

Another recurrent element in my work is the notion of time, involving layers of time and the introduction of space into time. This is but one reason why I regularly work in large series. 

In my art, I analyse broader societal issues against my own personal experiences and apply different methods to the study of different phenomena, which explains the recourse to different media.

Portfolio Song Jing 2020

A portrait of Song Jing by Roland Schöny

Roland Schöny is a cultural theorist teaching Digital and Transmedia Art at Vienna University of Applied Arts, exhibition curator, and writer on contemporary art.

Song Jing im Porträt von Roland Schöny

Roland Schöny ist Kulturwissenschafter mit Lehraufträgen im Bereich der Digitalen und der Transmedialen Kunst an der Universität für Angewandte Kunst, Ausstellungskurator und Autor für zeitgenössische Kunst.

Ausstellungsansicht FEMALE - lebt und arbeitet in Wien 2019

Song Jing spürt in der Serie Needle in the Sea (seit 2018) Identitätskonstruktionen zwischen Ost und West nach und befragt die Rolle des Individuums in der jeweiligen Gesellschaft. Auf kleinformatigen Baumwollkartons schreiben sich individuelle Emotionen ein, die sich zu einer großen Akkumulation von Gefügen fügen – auf der Suche nach Gleichgewicht.