Wildlife 2
Song Ling
宋陵
Production date
2017
Object Detail
Media
ink on paper
Measurements
triptych 172 x 260 cm
Notes
As a founding member of the avant-garde Pond Society group in the 1980s, Song Ling developed a cool, rationalist painting style that challenged the sentimental depictions of rural life that were popular at the time. He says, simply: ‘We disliked these kinds of things.’ Instead, he began a series of paintings of animals that symbolised people living under intolerable political pressure. Song came to Australia in 1988, and after the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989 he decided to stay. He lived and worked in Melbourne for almost 30 years before returning to China in 2017. His new paintings of animals, created with meticulously layered washes of ink on paper, represent his response to the transformed nation he found on his return. After an absence of so many years, Song Ling noticed a new spirit of greed and ambition. Today, he says, Chinese people will do anything ‘to kill and eat up their opponent’. In Chinese, the expression ‘dog eat dog’ is expressed as ‘man eat man’. Wildlife 2 shows just such a scene of carnage – in an Escher-like space of endlessly receding concrete beams and columns, animals roam and pace, hunt and are hunted. An eagle swoops with talons bared, while on the far right-hand side a kangaroo looks on in bemusement. Jaguars, at the top of this particular food chain, bring down their prey. Song Ling depicts wild animals rendered with beautifully observed realism but his real subject is human nature in the modern world.
Accession number
2017.022