Massimo De Carlo is pleased to present Combe the first exhibition by Chinese painter Lu Song in our Hong Kong gallery.

Lu Song is based in Beijing, where he returned after graduating from the Wimbledon College of Art London in 2006. The artist creates evoking acrylic landscape paintings, inspired by 19th century German Romanticism, which focus on the conception and depiction of an idealized place of safety or comfort, and the connections and disconnections between humans and nature. As put by the artist himself: “My work is about finding one’s inner peace while living in a harsh social context.”

Combe presents a new body of work that is a reflection on the descriptions of feelings and situations through painting. Lu Song paints dark green leaves, glimpses of jungle foliage, water and flowers on large-scale canvases. The landscapes that Lu Song creates and paints are never painted from real, but imaginary scenarios that are the outcome of daydreams. Of these images of fictional wilderness Lu Song says: “A painting should not be representing the reality, on the contrary the function of painting is to alter the texture of reality”.

Each painting in this new exhibition is a place of refuge from the processes of time and mortality, a place that can be sensed but not always understood. Combe is inspired by the emotions that Lu Song felt as, whilst making this body of work, he read the book Friday by French author Michel Tournier (1967), an enchanting retelling of the legend of Robinson Crusoe. Combe in French is a remote, rural territory that lies beyond the coast or the city. For Lu Song’s it is “The personification of the main character’s psychological activities, where the scenario changes meaning according to the description of his mental activities.”

Purity and mystery, romanticism and eroticism, discipline and mysticism are all key themes of Lu Song’s new body of work, where every feeling is expressed through a brushstroke.