Provenance:
- Artist's studio.
- Private collection Germany.


The Chinese artist Song Yu was born in Beijing in 1973. He studied at the College of Fine Arts and the Tianjin Art Academy.

In his powerful still lifes, two of which we are offering at auction, he impressively combines his Chinese tradition with his fondness for Dutch still life and flower painting, and thus creates a contemporary transformation of the classic still life. The basic commonality with the Old Masters is the fine, richly detailed and precise painting style and the compositional idea. However, through the impressive use of small details, the artist achieves a combination of the Western Old Masters tradition with a modern Eastern viewpoint and brings the works into the present day.

Thus, Song Yu presents his still lifes in bright, light spaces. He reduces the flowers to one type of plant, and this in turn is reduced to the extreme, as in “Green Melody”, where there is nothing but a pair of green leaves and a green pistil. He places the flowers in modern spaces, on a chair or chest of drawers. Sometimes he takes up the motifs of the still life in the background with pale, inconspicuous colours. The individual objects, as can be seen in this example, create a link with Asia.