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 the 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. A weeping willow rolls her eyes in elegant riposte to Frederick Law Olmstead and his kin. Song paints the broken promise of the landscape tradition. Narratives are loosened, symbols smeared. Slogging through his infinite backdrops, some glimmer of individual possibility remains, just beyond an ever-receding horizon.