As flower buds blossom at the fingertips, revealing thorny stamens, Binghui Song's works showcase the spectrum of emotions that life's impulses and artistic materials can reflect through the ultimate development of shaping materials.
Using glass, ceramics, and metal wrapping, Binghui Song creates sculptures and paintings in large volumes and otherworldly biological forms that brim with the joy of new life. The materials, heated to high temperatures, become natural, proliferating threads that flow and solidify with the artist's bodily movements, flashing with a metallic sheen. The body echoes the rhythms of nature and empathizes with the cycles of life. Therefore, these works do not need to be figurative, referential, or metaphorical. Flowers and leaves are beautiful because they embody life: "They are not my creations but the life of nature."
Typically spending months with the materials, the artist's individual life pulses contribute to the creation, forming sharp thorns at the ends of curves. These thorns are not only a visually alarming self-defence mechanism but also have the potential to harm the artist herself as she weaves her way through a dark, thorn-filled abyss, producing vibrant red.
Binghui graduated from the Royal College of Art in the UK and Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in China. Her studies in jewellery, accessories, and metalwork at the Tokyo University of the Arts in Japan have also led her to continually explore new possibilities for different artistic media and personal emotional expression. Painting and performance practice are her most natural and intuitive forms of creation. Yet, she finds renewal in the fusion of materials such as metal, enamel, and glass. These life forms lack worldly rules and traces, yet they brilliantly manifest their newly birthed perfection.
Currently living and working in London, Binghui's works have recently been exhibited at Charles Burnand Gallery, Eton College, Somerset House, and other galleries and institutions. She has participated in international art fairs in London (London Craft Week) and Venice (Venice International Art Fair 2022), among others.
Binghui Song is a London-based artist whose practice explores the intersection of material processes, systems of making, institutional structures, and language. Alongside her art practice, she has initiated two closely connected entities: SONG Art & Craft and Binghui Song Studio.
SONG Art & Craft is a hands-on workshop and educational platform dedicated to the exploration of craft as a speculative, relational process. The workshop offers material-based art experiences and skill-sharing activities, aimed at fostering public access to embodied making.
Binghui Song Studio (Community Interest Company) is an artist-led structural framework. It acts as a container for public programmes, collaborative experiments, and institutional interventions—reimagining what a studio can be when it moves between production, research, and care.
Together, these two entities form the core of Song’s expanded practice: one rooted in making, but reaching toward learning, dialogue, and cultural exchange; the other creates a field of experiment and long-term transformation.
Education
2020.9-2022.6 Royal College of Art MA Jewellery & Metal
2018.4-2019.1 Tokyo University of the Arts Further Study in Goldsmith
2010.9-2014.6 Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts BA Industrial Design
Bibliography / Books
2022 China Design Yearbook 2020-2021, Sino-Foreign Visual Arts Academy
Beijing, CN
Beijing, CN
2020 Invention Patents State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China