Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. You stroll through sterile galleries, sipping your lukewarm champagne, contemplating works you don’t understand but pretend to adore because you were told they were worth a fortune. Meanwhile, Song Kun, this Chinese artist born in Inner Mongolia, works relentlessly, creating a parallel universe where the real and the imaginary blend with a grace that would make you cry if you weren’t afraid of ruining your makeup.
Song Kun’s work produces that strange sensation one feels when observing a body through frosted shower glass; one can make out the contours, one guesses the movements, but the essence remains mysteriously veiled. It is precisely this play between revelation and concealment that characterizes her work. Her oil paintings, apparently simple, are in reality portals to psychic dimensions that Jung would have loved to explore.
In her series “It’s My Life” (2006), composed of 366 paintings each representing a day of her life, Song Kun offers us a visual diary of rare authenticity. Freudian psychoanalysis teaches us that desire is manifested through symbols that escape our consciousness [1]. Song Kun, by daily exposing her vulnerability, transforms the creative act into a form of self-analysis that allows us to access her most intimate anxieties and joys. If Freud had seen this work, he would probably have revised his theory of drives to include an aesthetic dimension that he too often neglected.
Each painting in this series is like a session on the psychoanalyst’s couch, where memories, dreams, and fantasies manifest themselves in colors and shapes. The dominant gray tone in her works is reminiscent of Freud’s concept of “benign neutrality,” that stance that allows the therapist to welcome psychic contents without judgment. Song Kun adopts this same neutrality toward her own life, transmuting her experiences into images that confront us with their disarming sincerity.
Song Kun’s work is also part of a profound reflection on the nature of time, a central theme in Bergson’s philosophy. For the French philosopher, lived time (duration) cannot be divided into successive instants as science suggests [2]. This duration is a continuous flow, a melody where each note contains within it all those that preceded it. The 366 paintings by Song Kun function according to this Bergsonian principle: each image, though independent, contains within it the memory of all the others, thus creating a unified temporal experience that the artist invites us to share.
Bergson distinguished the time measured by clocks (spatial time) from the time lived in consciousness (pure duration). Song Kun, by presenting her works according to a strict chronology but injecting an intense emotional dimension, shows us how these two conceptions of time can coexist. The series thus becomes a visual meditation on Bergson’s paradox of time: both divisible and indivisible, quantifiable and qualifiable.
As Bergson wrote in “Creative Evolution”: “Time is invention or it is nothing at all” [3]. Song Kun, inventing a new image every day, making each moment an opportunity for creation, perfectly embodies this conception of time as a creative force. She shows us that living authentically means constantly transforming the present into a work of art.
The fascination exerted by Song Kun comes from her ability to create art that refuses pompous artifices to focus on the essential. In 2012, with her installation “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” she immerses us in an aquatic universe where bodies float, transform, decompose, and recompose. This work irresistibly evokes Bergson’s idea of perpetual change: “Our personality grows, matures, constantly ripens. Each of its moments is something new added to what was before” [4].
Transparency, both in the literal and metaphorical sense, is omnipresent in her recent creations. In her series “ASURA SUKHAVATI” (2015), Song Kun draws inspiration from Buddhism to explore the boundaries between heaven and hell, desire and suffering. The translucent bodies she paints seem suspended between existence and non-existence, materiality and spirituality. This quest for transparency recalls Bergson’s search for intuition as a mode of direct and immediate knowledge, transcending the limits of analytical intellect.
While Song Kun’s early works were rooted in a relatively conventional figurative tradition, her recent pieces demonstrate an evolution toward a more synesthetic approach where painting dialogues with music, video, and installation. As she herself explains: “Narration in the style of stream of consciousness and the images of interval and synesthesia in the subconscious are the two concepts that play a key role in my works” [5]. This reference to modernist literature is no coincidence.
Virginia Woolf, an emblematic figure of the “stream of consciousness” literary movement, sought to capture in her novels the complexity and fluidity of human consciousness. Her novel “The Waves” (1931), in particular, presents a discontinuous narrative structure where the inner monologues of six characters intertwine to form a collective mental tapestry [6]. Song Kun, with her series “Visual Stream of Consciousness” (2013), performs a visual transposition of this literary technique.
In this series, Song Kun abandons linear chronology to create images that function as snapshots of consciousness, fragments of perceptions, emotions, and memories that coexist in the same pictorial space. As Woolf wrote: “Life is not a series of symmetrically arranged lamps; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope that surrounds us from beginning to end” [7]. Song Kun’s paintings are precisely those “luminous halos” that envelop human experience in all its complexity.
The literary technique of stream of consciousness aims to reproduce the discontinuous and associative nature of human thought. Song Kun, by transposing this technique into the visual domain, creates works that resist a linear and univocal reading. Her paintings function as visual testimonies where different layers of meaning overlap, intermingle, and sometimes contradict each other, thus reflecting the fundamentally ambiguous and polysemous nature of our experience of the world.
What is particularly striking in Song Kun’s work is her refusal of any didactic or moralizing stance. Unlike so many contemporary artists who bombard us with their predictable political messages, she prefers to explore the shadowy and ambiguous zones of the human experience. Her series “Xijia, River Lethe” (2008) is particularly revealing in this regard. Inspired by the mythological river of forgetfulness, she presents us with enigmatic images where human figures seem suspended between memory and oblivion, presence and absence.
This series evokes Woolf’s conception of time as a continuous flow where past, present, and future interpenetrate. In “Orlando,” Woolf writes: “An hour, once lodged in the strange human body, can stretch to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour can be precisely represented by the small circle of a small hand moving on a dial” [8]. Song Kun’s ghostly figures seem to inhabit precisely this elastic space-time where a second can contain eternity.
Song Kun’s strength lies in her ability to create images that function as evocations rather than illustrations. She does not tell us stories; she immerses us in atmospheres, moods, sensations. Her recent explorations of the Buddhist concept of “Sukhavati” (the Pure Land) testify to a spiritual quest that transcends religious dogmas to reach a universal dimension.
In her series “SUKHAVATI。o 0” (2018), Song Kun combines traditional painting, luminous installations, and transparent creatures evoking marine organisms. This series invites us to reflect on the boundaries between natural and artificial, organic and technological. Like Virginia Woolf, who explored in her novels the porous boundaries between self and world, Song Kun offers us a vision where the human is no longer at the center but part of a complex network of interdependencies.
There is something deeply liberating in Song Kun’s art. By refusing simplistic dichotomies (East/West, traditional/contemporary, figurative/abstract), she creates a space where different cultural and artistic traditions can dialogue. Trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, she incorporates in her work references both to traditional Chinese painting and to globalized pop culture, to Buddhism and to contemporary subcultures.
Unlike many Chinese artists who cynically exploit Western clichés about China, Song Kun develops an authentically personal visual language that transcends national or cultural labels. As she explains: “My art does not seek to impose rigid symbols or concepts. Rather, I offer a personal vision that explores how we can fully feel the experiences and emotions that life offers us, while maintaining a perspective unique to contemporary China” [9].
This position seems to me to perfectly correspond to Woolf’s vision of art as an exploration of “moments of being,” those moments of acute consciousness when we suddenly perceive reality in all its complexity and beauty. Song Kun captures these fleeting moments when the veil of habit is torn to reveal a deeper and more authentic reality.
By combining different media, painting, video, installation, music, Song Kun creates immersive experiences that engage all our senses. This synesthetic approach reminds us that our perception of the world is never purely visual but involves our whole body. As Woolf wrote: “I am not a single person, I am many people. Neither black nor white, nor men nor women. Neither one age nor one moment in time. I am many times, many people” [10].
Song Kun’s artistic approach seems to me deeply courageous in a contemporary art world dominated by cynicism and conformism. By uncompromisingly exploring her subjectivity and spirituality, she reminds us that art can still be a space for transformation and transcendence. In a Chinese art landscape often polarized between official propaganda and coded social critique, she charts a third path that favors the exploration of interiority.
Make no mistake, however: Song Kun’s art is not an escape into disembodied spiritualism. On the contrary, her works are deeply rooted in bodily and social experience. Her recent series “IMBODY-Feeling Real · Nude” (2019) explores representations of the female body in a rapidly changing Chinese society, where patriarchal traditions and consumerist hyper-sexualization coexist in a contradictory way.
Song Kun impressively manages to express a personal vision while resonating with universal concerns. Her art speaks to us of desire, loss, memory, spirituality, themes that transcend cultural and temporal boundaries. As Woolf wrote: “These moments of vision are of great depth; memory keeps them green long after everything around them has turned to dust” [11].
Song Kun’s art offers us precisely these “moments of vision” that illuminate our consciousness and persist in our memory long after we have left the exhibition. In a world saturated with disposable images and ephemeral sensations, her works invite us to slow down, to contemplate, to feel. They remind us that art, at its best, can be a form of active meditation that sharpens our perception and deepens our relationship to the world.
Faced with a work by Song Kun, one should stop. Take the time to really look. Allow oneself to be immersed in these ethereal atmospheres, these translucent bodies, these mental landscapes. Perhaps then one feels what Bergson called “intuition,” that immediate and sympathetic knowledge that allows grasping the essence of things beyond concepts and categories. And with a bit of luck, one might even forget for a moment that one is a bunch of snobs.
- Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Paris: PUF, 1967.
- Bergson, Henri. Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Paris: PUF, 2013.
- Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Paris: PUF, 2007.
- Bergson, Henri. Thought and Motion. Paris: PUF, 2009.
- Song Kun, cited in the catalog of the exhibition “Visual Stream of Consciousness,” Minsheng Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai, 2014.
- Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. Paris: Stock, 1974.
- Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. London: Hogarth Press, 1925.
- Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Paris: Stock, 1974.
- Song Kun, cited in the catalog of the exhibition “SUKHAVATI。o 0”, Cc Foundation & Art Center, Shanghai, 2018.
- Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. Paris: Stock, 1974.
- Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. London: Hogarth Press, 1985.
