Junli Song grew up in Chicago, but lived abroad from 2012-2018 in South Korea, England, Italy, and South Africa. Her studies are similarly widespread: she originally majored in economics and international development before returning to the creative path. She completed her MFA at the University of Arkansas with a concentration in printmaking. She is an artist and storyteller working across a range of media from printmaking and painting to sculpture and animation to explore imagined worlds and personal mythologies.

As a Chinese American woman, she has undertaken the project of world-building to create a space where she belongs, and to make sense of the complex, often contradictory, realities of existing between cultures. Centering around a female re-imagining of the mythological headless deity, Xingtian, as a symbol of resistance, the world created within these images exists as an imaginary realm where the liminal becomes a space of alternative existence. Drawing upon the fantasy and continual self-(re)invention inherent within diasporic societies, her work reveals the fluid nature of identity as inherited stories and traditions continually evolve.

Junli Song Interview

Artist Panel including Shea Hembrey, Junli Song, and Jessica Tucker at the Stanley Museum of Art