Song Huai-Kuei (1937–2006), widely known during her lifetime as Madame Song, was a legend in the spheres of Chinese art, film, music, and fashion during the 1980s and 1990s. With her husband, Bulgarian fibre artist Maryn Varbanov (1932–1989), Song helped foster a forward-looking creative scene and cultivated a modern, international lifestyle in China at a time when the country was largely isolated from the rest of the world for much of the Cold War.
After graduating from high school, Song was admitted to the oil painting department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where she fell in love with Maryn Varbanov (1932–1989), a student from the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. In 1958, Song, Varbanov, and their infant daughter moved to the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. There, the couple became artistic collaborators. They used tapestry—a traditional craft form with a rich history in the Balkans—as a medium for modernist experimentation, creating three-dimensional installations. Through serendipity, the two found ways to cross the Iron Curtain to participate in modern art exhibitions, including the Lausanne International Tapestry Biennial in Switzerland, before relocating to Paris in 1975.
In the 1980s, Song moved back to China to help Pierre Cardin (1922–2020), a fashion designer, expand his empire, and become active in the fashion industry. She also collaborated with Cardin to open a Beijing branch of Maxim’s, the renowned French restaurant. The media dubbed her the ‘Godmother of Fashion’, reflecting the frequency with which she judged modeling competitions. Song spent much of the decade facilitating a growing exchange between cultural and artistic figures in China and abroad. She helped secure Dior’s support for the comedy The Troubleshooters (1988) by fifth-generation director Mi Jiashan (b. 1947). She even appeared as Empress Dowager Longyu in The Last Emperor (1987), the epic film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci (1941–2018)