On the Way to Utopia #02, from the Tree of Life series, 2025, watercolor, oil pastel, street photography prints, vintage magazines, block prints, mixed-paper collage, and fabric cutout collage on Mylar, 42 × 72 inches.
EFA Studio Artist Xin Song received two reviews for her solo exhibition On the Way to Utopia, which was on view at the Tenri Cultural Institute from September 30-October 14.
“Her materials came from the life around her. Song moved to the United States in 2000, and in that unfamiliar culture, American magazines caught her eye. She began collecting vintage issues from the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, and she still draws on them, cutting these American images apart and rebuilding them into Chinese ones. Fabric was equally close at hand: her studio stands near New York's Garment District, and its remnants now sit beside textiles her mother gave her in Beijing, so that memory enters the work through the materials themselves.
What interests me most is how freely she accepts all of this. Her cultural background, materials associated with domestic and traditionally feminine practices, and scraps of the city around her are all welcomed into her work. She cuts, collages, sews, and assembles without being constrained by boundaries between fine art and craft, tradition and contemporaneity, or Eastern and Western visual cultures. The same openness extends from gallery installations to public art projects. She makes the freedom of contemporary art her own.”
―Soojung Hyun for Whitehot Magazine
―
“Up close, I see human bodies, faces, stores, roads, lettering, seated Buddhas, typewriters, and doorways like those in an American Chinese restaurant, all serving as placeholders for Song's embrace of her Chinese past. Images are boldly chopped from slick magazines, their writing erased by her cut lines. Paper bleeding through the holes reveals fans, archways, machine parts, stacked umbrellas, and columns from real Chinese architecture, all supporting white flowers with yellow tassels crowned by delicate red threads. Fiber art, collage, painting, and glitter on textured and photographic paper: the paper's viscosity coming toward me and receding, à la Hans Hofmann's push-and-pull.”
― Mark Bloch for Culture Catch