Pan Song was born in the 1970s.

　　He belongs to, as people tend to call them, “The Generation70’s”, a generation in whose eyes all the bitterness suffered by our homeland has become a blur.

　　Graduate from Central Academy of Craft Art, postgraduate from the Academy of Arts & Design of Tsinghua University, and now teacher at the Sculpture Department of Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology (BIFT), Pan Song’s talents and genius seem to guarantee him a smooth way to success.

　　Looking back at his graduate artworks, we find what have expressed in the Man, Cattle, Drummer and Archer are approximately kind of compact sense as suggested in Antoine Bourdelle’s sculpture. The masculinity spirits dominant in his artworks reveal Pan Song’s realistism.

　　The nude girl with a bull-horn hairstyle in another artwork, similarly of Bourdelle’s style, however, suggests certain magic, unrealistic fantasy.

　　Having got his postgraduate degree, Pan Song came to Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology working as a teacher.

　　A complete department of sculpture set up in an institute of fashion technology, such a combination although rare in China, is not a surprise. Fashion in reality can be comprehended as sculpture. Firstly, fashion is a complete three-dimensional structure; secondly, its past function of pragmatism has been substituted, to a large extent, by aestheticism, which is why those traditional tailors have been transformed into world-renowned fashion designers. Issey Miyake is among those fashion artists who have successfully designed clothes with sense of space by introducing into fashion abundant sculpture elements. Fashion may derive inspiration from sculpture, and it is true vice versa.

　　Pan Song has possessed a keen eye for that. There is a field where interweave and mingle the fashion design and sculpture creation as well as the fashion culture and sculpture culture, which involve a variety of seemingly contradictory categories, soft and hard, light and heavy, dynamic and static, fashion and eternal, to name a few. All these categories constitute a vivid and undeveloped field waiting for him to explore and develop.

　　Taking a good advantage of the academic circumstances in BIFT, Pan Song began to attend some fashion lectures, consciously watching fashion shows and getting access to fashion models, drowning himself in romantic aroma of fashion culture. The innate masculinity frequently coupled with sculpture has faded away, while an air of femininity has emerged as suggested in the Chinese poem “I think of her silver clothing at the sight of drifting clouds and her stunning appearance at the sight of flowers”.

　　Impressed by fashion models’ towering coiffure, hazy looks, slender limbs and the cloudlike clothes, Pan Song has created a pile of artworks with bronze, cast iron, gild and lacquer, all scattering in his warehouse, in various sizes, of different colors, quite spectacular.

　　The tone of this series ---- aesthetic, flamboyant, and even a little adulatory and decadent ---- is obviously not modernism.

　　Charles Alexander Jencks，Post-modernist architectural theorist, has noted a “radical eclecticism” featuring multiplex historicality and ornamentalism. Such image seems to gleam in Pan Song’s “Rainbow Fashion Series”.

　　Thoughts and values regarding Post-modernism are miscellaneous and diversified, though they share one common-ground, namely, the dissatisfaction about modernism. It is interesting that such dissatisfaction is not expressed ferociously in a way of rage or revolution as what the Modernism has done towards Classicism but, instead contrarily, in a disguise of humorous smile. Such rage is kind of “cool” which has become one of the popular criteria for aesthetic appreciation.

　　The Post-modernism vintage painting is the typical example of “dissatisfaction in disguise of smile” and “cool rage”; through revitalizing and reproducing classicism, it exhibits mechanism, rigidness, monotony and vapidness. Images in the picture have been shifted from hard-edge and special gamut as suggested by minimalism to nudity and intricate patterns as in Classicism, which will remind you of collections in Musée du Louvre. Besides, the juxtaposition of different molding elements and visual symbols is another important aspect of the Post-modernism artistic language: no logic relations, no distinction and discrimination between advance and backward, senior and junior; simply put, it is nondescript on purpose.

　　This is a certain complex，and an approach as well.

　　Pan Song’s “Rainbow Fashion Series” are a bit like sculpture versions of the Post-modernism vintage paintings of Chinese fashion. In other words, they are inter-related and overlapped. It is no surprise. The world today has become one with globalized cultures. We are here in Beijing, however, we are able to get access to the latest news worldwide via TV and Internet, to watch sports contests or fashion shows via living broadcast. Thus, the artistic trends and esthetic tastes dominated internationally will inevitable find their way into our fashion through visual channels and alike.

　　The girl with the bull-horn chignon in Pan Song’s “Rainbow Fashion Series” is apparently a typical case.

　　First, the girl’s silhouette and manners may remind you of the burial figures of tall handmaid from the Han dynasty. It is worth mentioning that Pan Song is much of an expert on Han burial figures, his interests in and study on traditional Chinese cultures ranging from Lao Tzu, Zhuang Tzu to Nan Huai-Chin. No wonder in Pan’s artworks we may catch a glimpse of figures of Taoist ascending to heaven and becoming immortal. However, the close fitting clothes appeared on Han burial figures have been substituted by a complicated stack of clothing lines, puff sleeve patterns with a Baroque atmosphere of European Court. The juxtaposition of above mentioned two elements is seemingly “far-fetched”, a third element appears though, contrary to the luxury and vanity of the royal court: the towering chignon or bull-horn hairstyle worn by girls remind you of barrens and loneliness in Northern China, Mongols women’s headwear, morin huur in the nomadic tribes’ tents, myths and romanticism as well as bitter cold in Northern Europe.

　　Mixture of Han burial figures, Baroque styles and Northern European myths, mixture of classicism, fashion and sculpture，these are the perspectives for which Pan Song is seeking ---- his thoughts drifting from Han Dynasty Rhyme to western ballads, from contemporary fashion to post-modernist decoration, from esthetic magnificence to rusty corrosion, from corporality of gilt to historicity of lacquer, Pan Song cautiously avoid the trap of seeking after aesthetic decoration.

　　Fashion designers, compared with sculptors, tend to be far more sensitive to the contemporary ethos and cultural elements; the latter, however, are apt to express them in a way with much more weight and density. The “Rainbow Fashion Series” are deemed to be a starting point indeed for Pan Song’s sculpture creation. The drifting thoughts embodied herein unfold to us his enormous genius and potential capacity.