Song Ling was born in 1961 in Hangzhou, China. He graduated in 1984 from the Department of Chinese Painting at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) and currently lives and works between Melbourne, Australia, and Hangzhou, China. His works are held in numerous public and private collections, including the Yuz Museum Art Foundation, Long Museum Shanghai, ANZ Bank Melbourne, Artbank Sydney, Deakin University, the Hawkesbury Art Collection, the Asia Pacific Museum of America, the National Gallery Singapore, Tianmuli Art Museum, HOW Art Museum, and Star Art Museum, among others.
From the outset of his practice, Song Ling has consciously sought to move beyond the established frameworks of traditional painting. Although he grew up in a family immersed in calligraphy and painting and was deeply influenced by Chinese classical culture and the literati painting tradition, his artistic practice consistently turns toward a critical re-examination and deconstruction of “tradition” itself. Rather than inheriting the lyrical and spiritual narratives historically associated with ink painting, he adopts a more experimental approach, juxtaposing sensation, representation, and concept to construct a complex and open-ended visual rhetoric.
Song Ling reinterprets classical Chinese painting through a process akin to “reduction,” gradually extracting the dense lyricism, expressive nuance, and spiritual orientation of the original works and transforming them into cool, concise planes and structures. This approach gives rise to images marked by emotional detachment and an erasure of overt traces of life. In this process, ink is no longer treated as an untouchable cultural symbol, but rather as an open medium that can be repeatedly mobilized and reconfigured.
Song Ling’s sustained attention to the texture of paper and the compression of the picture plane allows his work to remain intrinsically connected to the aesthetics of Chinese literati painting. At the same time, he draws on modern artistic references ranging from Cézanne’s geometric treatment of form to Cubist spatial concepts, translating them into a restrained and measured structural language. In his contemporary reconstructions of Chinese landscape painting, washes replace traditional texture strokes, and geometric structures stand in for natural mountains and rocks. The resulting images evoke an almost industrial sense of order, while still retaining the distinctive rhythm and cadence of an Eastern mode of seeing. Here, tradition and modernity are not positioned in opposition, but coexist through an ongoing process of reconstruction.