Song Kun, who was born in Inner Mongolia in 1977, studied oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing until 2002. A founding member of the N12, a group of twelve ambitious young graduates of the Central Academy of Fine Arts who have been organizing their own annual exhibitions, Song Kun was educated after the Cultural Revolution and raised in an era of accelerated urban and economic development.

Hailed as the most promising young female artist during the 2005 Triennial of Chinese Art, Song Kun’s work examines the minutiae of daily existence. The artist portrays an inherently individual perspective, collecting on canvas the concerns, fears, desires, growth, happiness, and confusion of daily life: the fleeting, innermost feelings of her generation. The meaning of her paintings lies in both their description of the physical and the emotional; they represent, perhaps, a sugar-coated protest against contemporary life. While her paintings are less overtly political than many of her predecessors and contemporaries, she uses her own unique visual language to give expression to the concerns and desires of everyday life, building an archive of those moments of peak emotion, cognition, and memory. Her most recent work interprets mobility, migration, and movement as political and sentimental devices of both control and resistance that have become characteristic of life in contemporary China.