SOFTEST SONG
This collection is a gentle and poetic take on the peaceful culture and stories of Song Dynasty China. From mythical creatures to symbolic animals, the collection focuses on the simplicity, refinement and tenderness of the era.
Each season, Sabina writes an essay to accompany the designs, summarising her research and reflecting on the specific themes, details, and ideas which influenced her final artworks. You can find an excerpt below, offering a brief overview of the time period in which the collection is set.
Please visit the Softest Song collection page if you'd like to read more about her research and inspiration.
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CULTURAL CONTEXT
The Song Dynasty (960-1127) began, as did all dynasties, as a story of heroes and villains, victories and defeats. Following the collapse of the Tang court, the first emperor of the new Northern Song dynasty was Zhao Kuangyin (927-976), and the government he established became one of the most accomplished and decent in history; its achievements in the realm of art would become the foundation for all later dynasties. This was an age of cultural and creative transformation in the long history of China.
The era saw the introduction of ‘literati-artists’, thecognoscenti, combining poetry, calligraphy and painting (the three perfections) and applying the idea of painting for pleasure, moving from objective and realistic depictions to a more lyrical expression. Literati-artists of the Song period started the practise of annotating a painting with a poem to enhance its enjoyment and used raw coloured silk backgrounds in place of parchment. Specifically, the practise of animal painting flourished like never before, particularly among this rising scholar elite of the tenth century. They soon became the dominant force in the artistic world, bringing a new, philosophical view of nature.
The Northern Song dynasty went on to enjoy some of the greatest imperial patrons of the arts ever to reign in China. Particularly outstanding was Emperor Huizong (1101-1125), eighth Song Emperor and a rapacious collector of art objects, while also being a painter and calligrapher of great talent himself. The changing tastes in animal painting were fully reflected in theXuanhe Huapu, the Song Imperial Catalogue commissioned by Emperor Huizong, containing 6396 paintings. It subdivided artworks into more specific subcategories; ‘wild and domestic animals’, ‘flowers and birds’, ‘dragons and fish’. By the 12thcentury, the Song imperial government owned more bird and flower paintings than any other subject.
All three categories in theXuanhe Huapuwere unique and highly specialised disciplines with the author’s critical evaluations favouring those showing ‘qiyun shengdong’, a term denoting spirit resonance: those full of life and vitality. It is an enigmatic and much debated phrase that means that the painter should endow his work with movement through harmony with the spirit of nature. During the Song dynasty, ‘qiyun’signified the conceptual and symbolic qualities associated with the depicted animals in accordance with the Song scholars’ view of the cosmological world order. In other words, animal motifs were chosen with a view to their intellectual symbolism rather than purely for aesthetic reasons.
