Featured artist: Song Kun
Quote from Christopher Knight’s LA Times review of the Beijing painter Song Kun:
Nowhere is it more engaged than in the triptych, where three panels show different views of a rock band playing on a club’s stage, fronted by a young female singer. In the lower left quadrant of each view, illuminated by stage lights that variously blare into your eyes, a uniformed soldier or policeman is seen from behind, intently watching the musical performance.
Song keeps shifting our point of view on the nightclub action, but it’s the official watching the free-spirited woman who seems to be the work’s true subject. Whether a performer merely being checked out by an unexpected fan, a symbol of youthful rebellion under the watchful eye of an authorized representative of government control or perhaps art being metaphorically monitored by shadowy proscriptions, the triptych mesmerizes. The show is Song’s U.S. gallery debut, and it represents a big step forward.
