This exhibition presents the remarkable artistic partnership of Maryn Varbanov (1932-1989) and Song Huai-Kuei aka Madame Song (1937-2006), China’s legendary couple whose life and work helped to transform the cultural landscape of economic reform-era China. Focusing on Varbanov’s installations made with a traditional Bulgarian technique - using goat’s hair and a cold-water centrifuge to produce felt - loosely resemble crowns of trees in a surreal forest. These seminal works helped bring him to the forefront of the fiber arts movement in Europe in the seventies. Shown alongside are Varbanov and Song’s collaborative butterfly wall works of the same period. These elegant works, inspired by Zhuang Zi’s famous butterfly poem, are at once magical and intensely feminine.
The playful and creative collaboration of Song Huai-Kuei and Varbanov not only foregrounds their shared artistic sentiments, but is a natural extension of their shared life and family which took them around the world. Produced in their Cité Internationale des Arts studio in Paris in the 1970s, these works act as precedent to the couple’s momentous return to China in the 1980s.
BANK is proud to present this selection of artistic output where we see the artists’ overlapping sensibilities and interests – modern and orthodox, organic and galactic, Eastern and Western, that have helped define their life and legacy.
