Origin: Beijing, China
Currently Based In: London, United Kingdom
Instagram: @claire_s808
Email: siqisong80@gmail.com
Siqi Song (b. 2004) is a Chinese artist currently based in the United Kingdom, where she is pursuing her BA in Painting at the University of the Arts London. Her practice explores themes of transformation, memory, and environmental consciousness through abstract mixed-media painting. Drawing from both personal history and global ecological shifts, Song creates deeply textured works that evoke the complex relationship between humans and the land.
Her process—rooted in harmonism—incorporates organic materials like soil, ash, and other earth elements, which she sprinkles, sows, and heaps onto her canvases. The result is a visual terrain that mirrors natural processes and human intervention. Her paintings are rich with metaphor, speaking to nostalgia, displacement, and the uneasy balance between urbanization and nature.
She has exhibited in Beijing and London, with recent solo and group exhibitions at The Handbag Factory, Dongsi Hutong Museum, and BROUHAHA ART. In 2025, she was awarded the Columbia Journal Art Winter Print Prize.
Featured Artwork at Bushwick Gallery
Title: City Landscape Conversion and Embodied Memories
Year of Creation: 2025
Medium: Mixed media
Dimensions: 48.4 × 24 × 2 inches
Edition Type: Unique, 1 of 1
Price: $4,000 USD
Description
City Landscape Conversion and Embodied Memories is a large-scale mixed media work that serves as both archive and excavation. Using materials gathered from the land—soil, ash, and organic fragments—Song layers her canvas with a tactile weight that echoes the sediment of memory. Photographic elements and chronological collages anchor the piece in human history, offering a visual timeline of transformation: from ancestral terrains to urban sprawl.
The work draws inspiration from a personal site of loss—Song’s childhood home, demolished and overtaken by weeds. This emotional landscape becomes the foundation for a broader meditation on the Anthropocene, where progress overlays erasure, and industrial precision clashes with nature’s quiet persistence. Through a technique that merges construction with ritual, Song invites us to confront the residues of modernity and the fragile vitality that endures in its cracks.
Exhibition Information
April 2025: “Urban Narratives: The City as Canvas”
Curated by: Fern Messa Joson
Theme: Turning the cityscape into a canvas, this exhibition captures the raw, vibrant energy of urban life through graffiti, street photography, painting, and more.
Exhibition Dates: April 3 – April 10, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 3 | 6 PM – 8 PM
Guided audio experience
For accessibility, the full video transcript is provided below for those who prefer to read or are unable to listen.
“You’re standing before a layered terrain—not a traditional landscape, but a visceral archive. This is City Landscape Conversion and Embodied Memories by Siqi Song. Look closely, and you’ll see: what first appears as abstraction reveals itself as sedimented memory, where earth tones bleed into ash, rust, and soot. It’s a canvas that doesn’t just depict the land—it becomes it.
Siqi Song, a Chinese artist based in London, uses mixed media to engage with land as both a physical and emotional site. She starts with raw material—dirt, pigments, organic residue—and builds a surface through a process of sprinkling, piling, sowing. Embedded in this work are black-and-white photographic fragments, spanning scenes of agriculture, industry, and upheaval. They’re not randomly placed—they’re stacked like a vertical timeline, tracing the shifting relationship between people and place, nature and control.
The top images reflect early human reliance on land: cultivation, survival. As your gaze moves down, the images grow more mechanical—tractors, factories, construction. Toward the bottom, the imagery becomes fragmented, suggestive of collapse and rebirth. Hands reappear throughout—holding, planting, resisting.
This is not just a story of ecological change. It’s about memory—what is held, what is buried, and what grows back through the cracks. Song was inspired by the demolition of her childhood home in Beijing. That loss—the grief and resilience entwined in that moment—fuels this work’s emotional gravity.
Even without knowing the artist’s personal history, you feel the weight of displacement here. The textures invite touch. The photos demand pause. And the composition—this earthy, living surface—reminds us that land is not just where we stand. It’s where we remember, rebuild, and sometimes, let go.”