In current Chinese art circles, Song Hai is regarded as an artist with a mastery of traditional Chinese techniques as well as a sense of innovation. He began to study Chinese landscape painting in the 1970s under the instruction of several noted artists. For over two decades he worked tirelessly towards acquiring the techniques and approaches of various schools of art, and traveled extensively across the country in order to see its mountains and rivers and feel the spiritual solace they brought. This experience has imbued his brush and ink works with a fresh, yet classical, perspective.
Song Hai's landscapes portray nature so vividly and realistically as to make viewers feel surrounded by ethereal mist, or above the clouds he so mystically intimates. Song Hai employs the traditional Chinese technique of contrasts in his paintings, making his mists as fine as gossamer, delicate and diaphanous as they connect and then dissolve, to the extent that they are invisible, yet present. His mountains, cliffs and rocks, on the other hand, appear as heavy and immovable as cast iron, yet these striking contrasts are harmoniously blended in his works. Song Hai sometimes uses coke ink, and the side of his brush, as well as reverse rubbing techniques, to create a effect of substance. Another technique he uses is applying ink heavily, and working it in with his brush so that it soaks into the paper in the desired image of distant misty mountains or forests saturated with fresh greenness.
Song Hai is intent on the creation of different artistic concepts. In his Spring Returns to the Earth, a tinge of light green beneath dim moonlight adds a touch of spring to the vast, otherwise lifeless wilderness. At the foot of bleak, cold cliffs and rocks a stream meanders, creating a bright curve within a lack luster setting. A wisp of vapor hovers over a bend in the stream, intimating a ray of hope within an environment of gray despair. Red Clouds depicts the loess landmass and gullies of China's northwestern plateau, an overall effect of solemn desolateness relieved only by the warmth of red clouds, reflected on trees and rocks that brings a message of hope and vitality to this dust-ridden plateau.
(China Today April 11, 2003)
