Born in 1964, Cai Xiao Song belongs to the generation that emerged after the Cultural Revolution. China opened its doors to the Occident in the seventies, when Xiao Song was a twelve-year-old adolescent. Between 1987 and 1991 he studied art at the Fine Arts Faculty in Shanghai. There he received an education that was restricted to traditional Chinese painting and 19th century academic European painting. Despite this, since his graduation in 1991 and for the following eleven years until 2002, Xiao Song pursued certain aims that are reflected in his works. We can distinguish three groups.

A first group of works, comprising oil and acrylic paintings, are distorted, almost unrecognisable, portraits of Mao that both Xiao Song and many other painters of his generation made in order to meet the demands of the Occidental market. A second group is also made up of easel paintings, and consists of pure text, words in Chinese and English. Xiao Song thinks words are the most direct means of expression that exists. He chooses ordinary words and through them and their associations he expresses his point of view about the society and politics of the time. But, however, he soon feels that this traditional painting method is very limited as regards visual possibilities. So he embarks upon a new path based on found objects that he takes out of context and charges with symbology. Xiao Song presents an item at an exhibition in which 25 artists work on the idea of a “seat”. In it he assimilates the meaning of the word “seat” in British English (the place occupied by a member of parliament) with the symbolic meaning of a bench or a chair in Chinese, “Wei Zi” (post), painting on it the five stars of the Pentagon on top of the Chinese national flag. With this he wishes to symbolise his nation under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

The turning point for Xiao Song comes in 1998. He decides to complete his studies for a year in France. When he gets to Paris he changes his mind and instead spends ten months travelling around Europe. After returning to China, he stops producing any kind of art and dedicates himself entirely to calligraphy. His aim is reflection. For Xiao Song, China should not turn into another Western Europe; it should become a new China, recover its own character. For that reason, in 2002 he decides to work on and produce the traditional Shan Shui mountain and water painting. His aim is to transform it and turn it into a new symbol for China, but by using traditional ancestral methods. His work today belongs within this context; in fact there are two Shan Shui paintings in the exhibition.

The exhibition comprises a set of six works that Xiao Song called Stones, two traditional Shan Shui mountain and water paintings, a calligraphy installation entitled Década (Decade), another installation made up of eight stones laid out in the shape of the map of China, and, finally, a site-specific piece for this exhibition: the map of Spain and the bat that symbolises Valencian history and tradition.

Década is an installation that covers tens years of Cai Xiao Song’s calligraphy in a 5 x 6 metre space and is made up of 100 pieces. In the installation, each Chinese character has its own shape and meaning, although it generates a new meaning when combined with the ones around it. It is as though we were speaking about our lives, about each of our experiences and the connections between them. The artist uses these random arrangements to reflect uncertainty and the unknown in the world to show us his relationship with art for a whole decade. However, the spectators can also make their own connections. It is as though time stood still to make way for reflection. In the words of Consuelo Císcar, Xiao Song’s calligraphic installations appropriate a harmonious lyricism and creativity, full of beauty, tradition and modernity. That millenary legacy in today’s global history leads us to discover how craftsmanship and conceptual art blend together in a very precise manner.

Each of his Stones is made up of two methacrylate pieces between which he inserts a piece of silk with stones painted on it in China ink and water. These two apparently opposing elements – silk and stone – are cleverly linked by means of contrasts: soft versus hard, lines versus curves, lightness versus weightiness and human work versus natural creation. Cai Xiao Song strives to form interdependent links between the elements he uses and at the same time between the different individual pieces produced, and by doing so creates a sort of collage. In this way too he opposes the ancestral method of Chinese painting to the contemporary Occidental method used by Braque and Picasso: collage. On the other hand, the simplicity and subtlety of transparency reveals to us what will always be static and permanent, regardless of the passage of time. In this line, eight of the pieces combine to form the map of China. Both stones and silk are very Chinese elements and with them he attempts to define China as an artistic nation. While the whole world is focusing on China’s political and financial power, Cai Xiao Song suggests we perceive China as a map of art.

In Cai Xiao Song’s art we find a meeting point between the cultures of the East and the West. They both appear defined as what they are, without interferences, conserving their own signs of identity. By reinterpretation, Xiao Song converts the treasures of traditional art techniques into symbols of a new vision of Chinese culture.