Contemporary art in China continues to be something of an art “phenomenon”, owing to the fact that Chinese society is still in the process of modernisation. The realities of change continue to provide a constant source of motivation to the sensitive souls and intense feelings of its artists. As Chinese society blends ever more closely with international society as a whole, particularly in new cultural associations, contemporary Chinese art enjoys greater opportunities to strike up dialogues with the international art world. The problem facing us currently is how a Chinese artist is to find their starting point amongst the complex and energetic state of contemporary art; with what novel concepts and unique language are they to present their individual goals? In a situation wherein the work of a majority of artists are orientated towards the direct relationship between art and reality, Xue Song’s artwork inclines towards a personal spiritual world, revealing a unique creative direction by taking a road that goes straight to the depths of the soul. In a period when the audience is accustomed to seeing ready-made images as the blueprint for all images in paintings, Xue Song returns to the basic characteristics of painting, focusing on the depiction of objects from the imagination. In a time when the technology of replication creates a rapid generation of images, Xue Song prefers to maintain the hand-crafted aspects of painting, slowing down the speed of creation, allowing his images to present the qualities of the hand-painted work. He has spent recent years single-mindedly lost in the creation of his “Rock Series”, this method embodies the usual characteristics of following contemporary art and the use of symbolism, however what is more significant is that in his treatment of his symbols, his artistic language creates a vivid relationship with the connotations of the forms he paints.

Xue Song has chosen rocks, symbolising a return to the nativism of cultural traditions. Rocks and the rockery are a representative image of classical Chinese culture, they combine the natural world with civilization. On the one hand they represent the natural properties of creation, they may even be seen as the transformation of the universe; whilst on the other hand, seen through the eyes of human experience, they become a spiritual symbol. Whether in poetry, literature or the visual arts, rocks and stones are an image at once possessed of shared metaphors and a sense of the personal, a symbol in which resides at once a description of the spirit of nature and the temperament of humanity. However, the rocks and stones painted by Xue Song have a connotation slightly different to that in the classics. They float in the gaseous atmosphere between heaven and earth, on the whole one would do better to describe them not as being of a dense solidity so much as of the same fantastic transformability of a mist, with the fluency of having no fixed abode, transience is its natural state. To a certain extent, this state of floating in mid-air makes the meaning of the “rocks” in the paintings approach the idea of the multitudes of the living in real life, floating living things with their own pulse. Many people paint rocks, and capture the weight of them, whereas Xue Song captures their lightness. From this point we can see that the rocks he paints are in fact an image borrowed from reality. He takes rocks, traditionally still-life, and makes them mobile, he replaces the clarity of their traditional form and transforms them into chaotic shapes, giving the traditional symbol of “rocks” a contemporary and currency of meaning.
  
Naturally, one cannot overlook Xue Song’s technique. He combines the forms of traditional Chinese brush paintings with the style of modern painting. Firstly, his canvasses are large, large enough to form organic connections with the visual dimensions of various spaces in modern architecture, which allows these works of contemporary art to establish relationships with people in modern public spaces. Secondly, he occasionally employs the dimensions of traditional Chinese vertical scroll paintings, giving the works a more literati feel. Clearest of all, he has broken through boundary between “ink” as it is used in Chinese painting and the colour of “black” as it is used in Western painting, using inky blacks to establish the tone of his canvas, and the colour wash techinques of traditional Chinese painting, the technique of layered washes of ink to carve out mountains and clouds, creating profound moods and diffuse atmospheres. The good taste which shows itself in every facet of his creations, pays tribute to his degree of self-cultivation and innate talents.

In my personal opinion, it would be more fitting to perceive the rocks in this series as a new set of cultural and psychological symbols, than as stones distanced from the trials and tribulations of everyday life. Perhaps they are from a place far beyond, perhaps they wish to be the stones that will repair the holes in heaven . They originate in Xue Song’s interpretation of nature, more so they are born of Xue Song’s inner world, the multi-layered complexity of their connotations are the essential characteristics of any piece of contemporary art.