East meets West. North meets south. Tex meets Mex. In the thrall of globalization, hyper- hyphenated culinary curiosities become signature souvenirs of metropolitan centers... the ramen burger, the Chinese burrito, the cronut. Flavors smash in dialectic. Meanwhile the city itself gets sliced into ever more distinct and finite servings; disingenuous attempts to serve everyone at once while serving no one at all.
With the lithe hand of a calligrapher, weighed down by a transcendentalist’s tears, Lu Song seeps the urbanist fever dream into his canvases. Ghostly citizens meander anonymous metropolises. River banks and rows of trees smudge up against distant skylines, all jostling for the foreground. Song paints the broken promise of the landscape tradition; narratives are loosened, symbols smeared. A weeping willow rolls her eyes in elegant riposte to Frederick Law Olmsted and his kin. Slogging through infinite backdrops, some glimmer of individual possibility remains, just beyond an ever-receding horizon.
Lu Song (b. 1982, Beijing, China) graduated in 2005 from the Wimbledon College of Art London. Recent solo exhibitions include Hinterland at Galerie Huit Hong Kong (2015), Hills Beyond the Backdrop at Alexander Ochs Galleries in Berlin, Germany (2014), and To the River Till Sunrise at Dominik Mersch Gallery in Australia.Song lives and works in Beijing; this is his first exhibition with Nicodim.