Song Yongping “Money Hostage”

WHITE BOX

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Inspired by the current state of accelerating money worship culture in China, Song Yongping seeks to communicate the idea of dollars being at once unusable and achingly desirable. He makes a statement about our relationship with money by turning the bills into aluminum prints, swapping the original American historical portraits by those of Mao, Karl Marx, a busty Passerby Woman and a grimacing Barak Obama adding verbiage, and eventually, wallpapering walls and floors with them.

Money naturally plays as important a role in the functioning of the art world as it does in any other activity in which goods and/or services are exchanged. Often the process is straightforward – art is made, it is sold – but the higher you climb in the money tree, the more slippery it becomes. So, it’s no surprise that money is sometimes the actual subject matter of art, the way Chardin laid a table with jugs, Cezanne used apples or Picasso his guitars, because money always implies a story. As with Rembrandt’s early masterwork, Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver, images of the currency almost always bear a load of meaning. Many meanings, in fact, and often dark ones.

About Song Yongping

Song was born in 1961 in Shanxi Province, Northern China. He graduated from the Tianjin Academy in 1983, set up as a painter, and joined a Beijing group, New Pictures of the Floating World, who were critiquing the materialism of Post-Maoist China, rather as certain of their contemporaries in New York were mocking the commodification of the art world.

About Jon Tsoi

Tsoi was born in China in 1958 and studied in Sichuan. Tsoi studied art at Montclair State University and the Art Student League. He had his first solo exhibition at La Mama Gallery in 1893 and has since exhibited internationally, recently performing at Manifesta, the European biennial of Contemporary art in Palermo, Italy.