Artist: Song Ling

Title: Celosia cristata

Size: 70 x 50 cm

Material: Ink on paper

Year: 2011

Donated by Song Ling

Lot. SA-34

Reserve: US$2,500

Chinese born Song Ling came to Australia in 1988. He graduated from the China National Academy of Fine Arts in 1984, and the following year was involved in the important New Wave art movement in China. In 1986 he co-founded the Pond Society with Zhang Peili and Geng Jianyi, bringing an early form of paper-cut graffiti to the streets of Hangzhou at a time of changing pressure and freedom. Soon after he immigrated to Australia, which had a profound effect on the aesthetic of his work. He utilizes both the traditional and contemporary in his work - Chinese folk arts and embroidery, contemporary printing processes, traditional symbolic imagery and pop/sub-culture references - which at once compete and complement one another, but he is most interested in the final outcome being that of extraordinary beauty.

Song Ling was a finalist for the prestigious Archibald Prize twice, in 2008 and 2011, and his self-portrait is held in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia. In 2011 three of his works were auctioned by Sotheby’s and acquired by the Yuz Foundation. At the time they commented, “as contemporary art is increasingly bought out by capital and loses its will to fight and capacity for doubt, we can experience, in Song Ling's work, a purity that belongs only to the 1980s.” He is represented by Niagara Galleries and Michael Reid in Australia, and currently lives and works in Melbourne.