Li Songsong’s Impasto Paintings Rooted in History

3 hours ago7 min read4 comments

Stepping back from one of Li Songsong’s monumental canvases is like watching history resolve from a blur of memory. His signature technique—applying oil paint in wide, almost architectural impasto strokes—doesn't just depict a subject; it actively constructs a barrier between the viewer and the historical photograph or film still that often serves as his source material.This is not mere abstraction for aesthetic pleasure; it is a deliberate act of obfuscation, a visual metaphor for the way personal and collective memory layers, fractures, and obscures the past. Each thick daub of color, a cacophony of muted earth tones and sudden, jarring highlights, functions like a pixel in a low-resolution image, forcing the audience to engage in an act of archaeological reconstruction.We are not passive observers but active participants, piecing together the narrative from the fragments he allows to surface through the textured terrain. This method invites immediate comparison to the heavily worked surfaces of artists like Anselm Kiefer, who also uses materiality to grapple with the weight of history, yet Li’s approach feels uniquely rooted in a specifically Chinese context of navigating public history and private recollection.His work consistently returns to found images from mid-20th century China, a period of immense and complex transformation. By rendering these moments in such a physically dense and tactile manner, he questions the very reliability of the photographic document and the official histories they are often meant to cement.The paintings become palimpsests, where the physical act of painting—the laborious building up of pigment—parallels the psychological process of remembering and re-interpreting. There is a profound tension in his work; the images are often recognizable in their general composition, hinting at a shared cultural memory, yet the impasto surface creates a distance, a veil that suggests the impossibility of ever fully accessing the unvarnished truth of the past.This is not art that offers easy answers. Instead, it lives in the difficult space between commemoration and questioning, between the solidity of the historical record and the fluidity of individual perception.In an era of digital oversaturation, where images are fleeting and often manipulated, Li Songsong’s painstaking, analog process feels like a radical and necessary counterpoint. He demands that we slow down, that we lean in and confront the materiality of history itself, in all its messy, complicated, and beautifully unresolved glory.

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#Li Songsong

#impasto painting

#contemporary art

#oil painting

#art exhibition

#abstract history

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