Xue Song

Xue Song (薛松) was born in Dangshan County, Anhui Province, China, in 1965. He studied at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, graduating from its Stage Design Department in 1988, a training that would leave a lasting imprint on his sensitivity to surface, composition, and the layered construction of visual meaning. Working primarily in Shanghai, he developed a distinctive practice built around the burning and collaging of printed materials — fragments of mass-media imagery, commercial ephemera, and art-historical reproductions — fused into densely textured paintings that engage simultaneously with Pop culture, Chinese tradition, and the turbulence of contemporary life.

Over the course of a career spanning more than three decades, Xue Song has exhibited widely across Asia, Europe, and North America. Solo presentations have been held at ShanghART Gallery in Shanghai and Singapore, Chinese Contemporary Gallery in London and New York, Walsh Gallery in Chicago, ArtChina in Hamburg, and Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery in Hong Kong, where exhibitions including A Tale of Our Modern Time (2008) and In Search of Dao – the Latest Works of Xue Song (2022) traced the deepening philosophical arc of his work. He has also participated in international group exhibitions such as Paris-Pekin at Espace Pierre Cardin in Paris in 2002. Since 2023, Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery has represented him exclusively worldwide, with the forthcoming solo exhibition Where Is the Mountain? in Singapore scheduled for 2026.

In recent years, Xue Song's practice has undergone a significant evolution. Beginning in 2019, he developed The Dao from Nature, a major series of paintings that moves away from the Pop-cultural collage vocabulary of his earlier work toward landscape, abstraction, and an engagement with Daoist philosophical inquiry. This body of work formed the centerpiece of Meta-Nature, a survey exhibition covering approximately four decades of practice held at the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning from March to June 2025. His work is held in numerous prominent collections, among them the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, the Uli Sigg Collection, the Goetz Collection, the Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation, the YUZ Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the UBS Art Collection, alongside corporate holdings at institutions including JPMorgan Chase Asia Pacific, Credit Suisse World Headquarters, Bank J. Safra Sarasin, the Bank of East Asia Shanghai, Coca-Cola Asia Pacific, and MGM Cotai.