Artwork Description

Title: Eighteen Pai – Red Excavator
Artist: Yulin Song
Date: 2010
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 70.9 x 61 in (180 x 155 cm)

1. Artwork Identification
Yulin Song's Eighteen Pai – Red Excavator is a large-scale oil on canvas from 2010 that powerfully renders an abstracted industrial motif. Dominated by an imposing crimson form, suggestive of an excavator arm, the composition is built upon intricate crosshatching and textural density. Layers of rhythmic red and black lines create a visual tension between motion and solidity, drawing the viewer into its mechanical yet meditative structure.

2. Artistic Style and Influences
The work exemplifies a fusion of Constructivist sensibilities and contemporary abstraction. Song's use of gridded mark-making recalls the methodical rigor of systems art, while the emphasis on machinery invokes a mechanistic futurism. The red form, unmistakably evocative of heavy industrial equipment, serves as both symbol and abstraction—a duality central to Song’s artistic vocabulary. The artist’s gestural density also nods to Chinese calligraphic traditions, abstracted into a modern visual dialect.

3. Historical Context
Created in 2010, Eighteen Pai – Red Excavator reflects the intersection of rapid industrial expansion and contemporary Chinese art’s response to mechanization, urbanization, and labor narratives. In an era of immense infrastructural transformation, artists like Song explored the visual and psychological footprint of machinery. The “Eighteen Pai” Title: alludes to a specific cultural or geographic context, potentially referencing a district or an industrial motif steeped in personal or regional memory.

4. Provenance
Provenance documentation can be provided upon contact.

5. Condition and Conservation
The artwork is in very good condition. The surface is stable, with no signs of paint loss, flaking, or structural damage. The dense layering of pigment is intact and visually consistent, and the canvas remains taut and well-stretched. No conservation work is currently required.

6. Artistic Significance
Yulin Song’s work contributes meaningfully to the evolving narrative of post-industrial Chinese contemporary art. By abstracting mechanical forms into emotive, labor-intensive surfaces, he invites reflection on modernity’s material and cultural costs. Eighteen Pai – Red Excavator stands as a compelling testament to his ability to transform industrial symbols into painterly explorations of identity, repetition, and power.