Platform China｜Zhang Chen: Mapping the Real — Song Yuanyuan's "Sodom"

Mapping the Real

—Song Yuanyuan's "Sodom"

Song Yuanyuan’s recent works take place across a series of "vacant lots." They are vast and clamorous, collaging a multitude of bodies and heterogeneous images, much like the layered history of that northern land. Within the crevices of the vacant lots, human figures labor hopelessly, or are humbly suspended in certain emotions—anxiety or euphoria; while the unpeopled landscapes, posturing through space and objects, provide a wandering theater for the hesitant silhouettes of individuals. In the genealogy of Song Yuanyuan's personal creation, after retrospecting past burdens and memories, the "vacant lot" at this moment no longer merely refers to a physical site, but has also become a place of exile for the artist's spiritual world, and a buffer against external reality. It presents itself both as the lack and barrenness of the Lacanian "Real," and as something brimming with the intensity of power due to the continuous production of desire.

Exhibition view of Sodom, 2026

More precisely, the "vacant lot" here is alienated into a closed, Sodom-esque city-state. It concerns body and power, an unsettling subversive surge, releasing energy amidst the infinite contraction of spatial boundaries. Yet we suddenly realize that this Sodom, this former capital of desire and sin, this land forsaken by both god and man, has actually long been suspended outside of time and space. It produces no value, leads to no future, but merely circulates trauma and restlessness internally—this points precisely to "the Real" articulated by Jacques Lacan from a psychoanalytic perspective. There, on the one hand, the body endures the shaping and discipline of linguistic structures, capitalism, and ideology; on the other hand, once all regulating and repressive power ceases to exist, we will also lose our reliance and have nowhere to hide. We might attain unprecedented freedom in the Real, yet simultaneously lose our own subjectivity. In other words, struggle and suffering are ultimately the eternal destiny of being human, and the incredibly authentic Real cannot truly inhabit reality; it can only briefly return in the realm of art. Song Yuanyuan's painting can be said to be a precise mapping of the Real, carving out a temporary vacuum zone between the crushing weight of the city and the resistance of the body.

Sodom-Hall, Oil on canvas, 160x110cm, 2024

The solo exhibition titled "Vacant Lot" encompasses various periods of the artist's creation, folding into a visual archaeological site spanning over a decade. The exhibition does not follow a linear temporal narrative, but primarily operates through three intertextual and mutually illuminating creative phases: the new "Sodom" and "Matrix" series, which establish carnal fanaticism and spiritual internal friction; the "Vacant Lot" series (2024-2025), serving as spatial deconstruction and reality buffer; and the early works (2015-2018), acting as historical retrospect and power metaphor. Through cryptic threads navigating among the three and hidden deep within the images, the exhibition bridges the artist's seemingly fragmented and disjointed stylistic shifts, constituting a massive closed loop of meaning and a phenomenal site.

Body

We first encounter "Sodom," colliding head-on with a succession of black bodies. Here, Song heavily employs a mixed media of pencil, charcoal, acrylic, and oil, using coarse, raw lines with a strong sense of scraping to outline material entities that release instinctual desires. The identifiable faces belonging to the bodies are erased one by one, replaced by colossal, intertwining, and even mutually devouring human shells. Imprisoned in an equally unrecognizable and unnamed white space, they are heavily compressed by collages of various industrial scaffolds, furniture, and instruments of torture, thereby provoking visual violence and physiological discomfort. Such bodies do not exist as objects of desire, but as the material carriers of painting and the waste products of desire production; that is, they are the residual debris of the Real, much like the tragic end of the beings in the biblical Sodom post-destruction, turning into barren saline land and solidifying into pillars of salt.

Consequently, in the "Sodom" series, we witness the production of desire and hear the continuous roar of desiring-machines, but amidst the interlacing of heterogeneous images and the knots of black bodies, we also observe the various blockages, interruptions, and inward collapses of the flow of desire. Desire is not accurately fed here; it cannot project itself into specific emotions with the body as an object, and thus the body undergoes self-disintegration. It would be better to say that these paintings in Song's "Sodom" are neither a wanton release of desire nor a sentimental expressionism and deliberate performance of posturing, but an honest capture of the contemporary human condition and spiritual state.

Vacant Lot, Oil on canvas, 262x480cm, 2025

Between the body-depicting "Sodom" and the unpeopled landscape series, a massive diptych "Vacant Lot" (2025) lies across the exhibition's pivotal node, linking Song's seemingly disparate creative phases. In this painting, the art-historical thread from Song's early works persists, emerging as Caravaggio's masterpiece "The Crucifixion of Saint Peter." In this typical religious work, Peter humbly declares at his martyrdom that he is unworthy to be crucified like his teacher Jesus, and is thus arduously hoisted upside down by his executioners. Here, the labor of the figures suspended in the vacant lot produces no surplus value, serving merely as embellishments in the unpeopled landscape. Just as Caravaggio did initially, Song combines the site of a saint's martyrdom with the bodies of lowly laborers, making it difficult for the viewer to momentarily distinguish the sacred from the profane; the ecstatic moment of enjoying God and the religious passion immersed in suffering also seem secretly combined with bodily lust and ambiguous climaxes, much like the ambivalent bodies in "Sodom" caught in sexual desire yet never joyful, and those cyclical, extreme experiences of sadism and masochism. We find that the black backs crawling in Sodom are exactly the same pose as the laborers shouldering wooden crosses in Caravaggio's work. Therefore, the moment the saturated figure appears as an image of eros, he simultaneously disappears, blurs, and transparently recedes into the depths of the picture; the bodies have completely exhausted their own desires, sinking into the great desert of the Real, becoming but a solitary element in the landscape of the vacant lot.

Nearby Core, Oil on canvas, 175x155cm, 2025

Song Yuanyuan's painting thus establishes an association of meaning within the concealment and emergence of the body. The formless, deprived body continues to act through objects and space as a theater in his landscapes, narrating the impurity of the desiring world. Facing the large-scale "Vacant Lot" is a peculiar pink amusement ride in "Nearby Core" (2025). Like the restless bodies in "Sodom," it solitary performs mechanical movements under the influence of gravity, repeating itself between powerless drooping and lofty rising. It should have been a public machine for generating joy, yet at this moment, it exudes alienation and estrangement with a frigid posture.

Rising, Oil on canvas, 100x80cm, 2024

Falling, Oil on canvas, 100x80cm, 2024

Meanwhile, between "Falling" (2024) and "Rising" (2024), between lightness and heaviness, Song constructs the perspective of the city and architecture using a spatial posture splayed like human limbs. The black interiors and midnight landscapes swallow the bodies that will later appear in "Sodom"; while the red masses floating in the sky, resembling viscous blood or spasming muscles, both evoke the gory flesh in Francis Bacon's paintings and resemble a mushroom cloud slowly rising after a nuclear explosion. It detonates ruthlessly in the unpeopled vacant lot, revealing the energy that this familiar land cannot bear: facing past memories and present ruins, the artist's uncontrollable psychological tension not only leaves the vacant lots of each serial painting ready to pivot towards the flesh at any moment, but also implies a certain dangerous aura about to erupt nearby, like a true prophecy of an impending local war.

Collage

The collage technique in Song Yuanyuan's painting derives from his research on photography. This creative method, also seen in the work of Francis Bacon, activates complex image materials into painting creation, and concretizes the emotions hidden within the images into the shapes of bodies. Consequently, during the painting process, bodies and objects collide directly in the same space, converging into the clamorous polyphony within the genealogy of Song's work, and constituting a continuous exploration of the artist's creative methodology beyond style and theme.

It is observable that even within the "Sodom" series, alongside those frantic figures, Song retains small areas of heterogeneous image collage. Through details and fragments, they articulate the coherent thread linking the new works and the old. There, chandeliers or instruments of torture, chairs and dining tables, all once appeared as independent subjects in the scenes of the vacant lots, but now, juxtaposed against the massive and chaotic flesh, they flash back as surviving memories of past rooms. In the picture, the artist is present through emotion and memory, constantly reflecting the scale of his own body. Between the collaged images, the recurrent ghost-like floating circles and savagely flowing color pigments are all traces of the artist's physical exertion during the painting process; they are visualities derived from hand movements and tactile sensations, acting as triggers that, mediated by the body, activate the potential and movement of the images.

Such image movement also originates from the life and history that Song faces. On this northern land, traditional civilization, the heavy industry that was once glorious but rapidly declined, and the encroaching logic of commercial real estate are brutally compressed together. This compression generates visual collages and heterogeneous connections of bodily experience, as well as a series of disjointed fissures, of which Song is precisely the observer. In this sense, from "Vacant Lot" to "Sodom," the evolution of Song's painterly visage is not only a realization of the desolate undertone of that vast land by an artist raised in unique soil, but his work also points towards a re-confrontation with history and a renaissance concerning the future through an incredibly resolute shift in expression.

Furthermore, the prototypes for the collage of these paintings and images mostly derive from Song's personal life and his working environment. It could even be said that the artist's studio is a "Sodom" city-state concentrating the flow of desire, the very same uncomprehended, solitary "vacant lot." Song forces these customary everyday objects he encounters into the canvas, translating scenes of work and life into painterly material substance, thereby highlighting a contemporary Neo-Realism. Distinct from previous historical traditions, distinct from classic "realism" figurative techniques, and even more distinct from its constant peril of degenerating into dependence and sycophancy, this Neo-Realism is more desolate and fragile, placing greater emphasis on individual authenticity. It is incompatible with the mainstream of the times, attempting to forever maintain distance, and thus manages to remain perpetually sober.

Memory

Left: Untitled, Oil on paper, 13x18cm, 2024; Right: Untitled, Oil on board, Diameter 16x15cm, Height 16cm, 2024

Finally, we know that both "Sodom" and the "Vacant Lot" bear specific personal and collective memories. For a sensitive artist born in Northeast China, these memories are extraordinarily visceral and real. It can be said that precisely through continuous retrospection, rumination, and transformation of memory, Song's more detailed early realistic scenes, using the "vacant lot" as a site for dismantling and transit, ultimately fall and become the heavy "Sodom." In the early work "Gate" (2015), Western and Soviet architectural styles bizarrely interweave in daily life, blending into the gate of a certain collective apartment building. The space originally intended for passage turns claustrophobic here; it not only obstructs the line of sight but also symbolizes a kind of insurmountable institutional hierarchy and class barrier. The bronze statue of Lenin standing high in the picture also reminds us, with an authoritative posture, that the historical memory we are so familiar with has been branded by politics and power from the very beginning.

Gate, Oil on canvas, 300x200cm, 2015

Scepter and Snake, Oil on canvas, 120x160cm, 2017

On-site at the exhibition, when we navigate through the convoluted entrance of "Gate" and step, enlightened, into another hall, we find that the brief thrill of escaping from oppression is immediately enveloped by another cramped space resembling a confessional. There, scepters and steel cages swiftly replace the viewer's curious, prying gaze with reflection and introspection: "Scepter and Snake" and "Clown and Scepter" from 2017 are naturally a certain materialization and visible depiction of power, but ironically, the sublime scepters here originate from window bars, from objects readily found in everyday markets. They are so cheap that they could be discarded at any time, yet they obstinately maintain a severe order, confirming precisely the frailty and absurdity of power—they must parasitize material objects, operate continuously through what Lacan terms the Symbolic order, and sustain their majesty through symbolic packaging. Song's de-sacralization of power symbols is, in fact, an act of clearing his own "memory baggage." He utilizes detailed painting as a method to continuously deplete the heavy burdens piled up in the real and spiritual worlds; and for the artist, this cleansing is the inevitable path to finding the individual amidst social memory, navigating through the siege of vacant lots toward the city-state of the self.

The bad power, Oil on canvas, 150x200cm, 2018

In early works like "The bad power" (2018), Song focuses more on interior scenes at this time, internalizing an external power structure into extreme psychological claustrophobia. Dark rooms, dilapidated wooden columns, and the silent dialogue between objects all exude a Foucauldian disciplinary undertone. In these early paintings, bodies are often absent, deprived, and objectified; they are the recipients of power. And it is precisely this extremely repressive "interior," laden with too much historical baggage and memory, that constitutes the intrinsic motivation for Song's subsequent move toward the "vacant lot"—he blew up these rooms with his own hands, acquiring a chance to breathe in the clamorous yet lonely outdoors.

Once these symbols of memory have been fully depicted, dismantled, and alienated, they are liberated from fixed social meanings, becoming image components that can be freely collaged later in the "vacant lot." From the fall of the "scepter" to the exile of the "vacant lot," from the silent indoor furnishings to the chaotic, open "Sodom," Song has undergone a transition from focusing on symbolic meaning to focusing on pure materiality, also revealing a shift in painting from serving a narrative function as image to acting as a trajectory of power for the image. When all these works are displayed side-by-side, the former narrative inducement of painting is infinitely compressed by suffocating visual intensity in the new series, which not only declares a genealogical turn in the artist's creation but also accounts for the ins and outs of a personal prehistory.

Conclusion

In Song Yuanyuan's "Vacant Lot" solo exhibition, the toppling of the "Gate," the laboring forms and suspended garbage in the "Vacant Lot," and the broken walls and ruins left by history—all ultimately melt into an indescribable, charcoal-black mass of flesh amidst a period of hopeless bodily wandering and the fanatic clash of "Sodom." And these interrelated and mutually explanatory creative periods successfully converge, via anachronism, flashback, and intercalation, into the constellation collaged by paintings and images.

Sodom-Interior and Exterior View, Pencil, acrylic, graphite, and oil on canvas, 220x150cm, 2026

It can be understood this way: for Song Yuanyuan, the "vacant lot" is ultimately a buffer zone, as well as a laboratory. Within it, the artist experimented with how to handle those images detached from the sequence of power, and also transformed early repressions one by one into the theater of objects, the spectacle of space, and the hysteria of the body. In "Sodom," under the shadow of past memories and early works, the labor of the body manifests ample power while also revealing exhaustion and despair. Or rather, as the spirit continues to drift above the vacant lot, it finally realizes its inability to escape, acknowledging that the incomplete, fragmented body is the only true foothold. "Sodom" is not a city existing far away, much less an ideal utopia; it is the remainder after the extreme operation of power, the carnal status quo of every closed individual. Perhaps regardless of whether we can step into the unpeopled vacant lot, we can never return to the unsymbolized Real in the end. Facing this reality, Song Yuanyuan chooses the arduous path of continuously devoting himself to the desire-production of art. In this vacant lot, though no one leaves and no one arrives, painting is always happening.

Text by Zhang Chen

Zhang Chen is an art historian, critic, and curator, and Associate Professor at the School of Humanities, Central Academy of Fine Arts. His research focuses on visual culture theory, Western art history, and comparative studies of Chinese and international art. He is the author of Body, Image, and Art History and Body · Space · Time: Studies on Deleuze’s Art Theory, and has translated A New History of Italian Renaissance Art, Art Since 1985: Contemporary Art Theory, and Impressionism, among other publications.