Innately Sufficient

Creation Time: 2025 Size: 76x90x124cm Material: Polyurethane Spray Foam, Spray Paint

This is the most personally fulfilling work that Song Jianshu has completed in recent times. To him, the piece carries deep personal significance, but beyond that, it holds no deliberate meaning. And yet, it constitutes a vital fragment of his creative and life experience. Since beginning his MFA studies, Song’s artistic focus has shifted toward the exploration of material language in sculpture. A core tenet of this approach is to let materials “speak” for themselves—to engage with their innate properties, and from that understanding, develop working methods that respond to the material’s nature, allowing one or multiple modes of expression to emerge.

At the time of creating this work, Song was also undergoing an introspective journey. He came to a realization almost intuitively:
When the Creator makes a cloud or a stone, is there any intent as to what it should resemble, or what it should express?
Ultimately, it is the viewer who projects their own emotions onto what has been created. People see white horses galloping in clouds, tigers crouched in stones, purity in the color white, and resilience in the hardness of rock. But in truth, a cloud is just a cloud, a stone merely a stone—a cloud is not white for sanctity, and a stone is not hard for strength. They simply are what they are.

When a sculptor forgets that he is shaping a cat, a dog, or a human form—when he releases himself from the need for representation—then every form he produces, every physical presence, becomes a sculpture in its own right. This is a return to the essence of material-based sculpture.

In this work, Song focused solely on the present state of transformation in expanding foam. The simple armature serves only as structural support. The piece contains no reference to politics, history, identity, or culture. It tells no story, bears no symbols, carries no narrative. There is no effort to replicate a referent, no predetermined vision, no emphasis on control or accentuation of features. What exists is a pure, unforced interaction: a spontaneous dance between the artist and the material. As the foam expands, Song adjusted his gestures in real time—adding a little here, subtracting there—with fluidity and freedom. The foam, in its own generative process, resists complete control. In this way, both the material and the artist arrived at a kind of self-sufficient state.

No symbolic plant forms were needed to lend meaning to the piece. Its presence is defined purely by the looseness, freedom, and material immediacy of the signifier itself.

The artist reflects that throughout his career, art has often been the formalization and visual realization of thinking—an endeavor marked by pressure and anxiety. Only on rare occasions has he experienced a kind of unpremeditated clarity through engagement with a particular material—moments of artistic liberation. But this time, he feels he has more clearly grasped the logic behind such moments:

“The greatest truths are the simplest. The finest vessels require no crafting. The loudest sound is silence. The truest form is formless.”

To return faithfully to one’s own sensations and experiences with materials—this, he believes, is where the healing power of art truly begins.