Chaos and belief, a midcareer solo exhibition by Beijing-born, New York-based artist Xin Song, challenges every preconception viewers might have about Chinese papercutting. A folk art form with a roughly 2,000-year history, cutting paper into intricate abstract patterns or stylized representations of people, flora, animals, or mixed scenes, is a traditional way of decorating walls and window, giving small gifts, and marking special occasions such as holidays, birthdays, or anniversaries.

Like all forms of “feudal” cultural legacy, this practice was suppressed or neglected during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when Socialist Realism was the one-and-only officially sanctioned art style in China. Only after the death of Mao Zedong, when both traditionalism and experimentation reemerged, did papercutting win recognition as a modern-art practice.

Curated by art critic Richard Vine, Chaos and belief is a compact survey of Song’s recent work, emphasizing both its formal diversity and its playful yet deeply serious intent. The selection reveals that Song’s most popular works—those that highlight quilt-like patterns or floral motifs—stand halfway between the two poles of her ongoing artistic concern. One is the emotional turmoil at the center of our psychic life, personal and collective; the other is our capacity for altruistic commitment. Thus images of flowers, stylized waves, and decorative abstractions share the gallery space with a huge, turbulent installation whose twisting and curling paper streamers seem to explode from the wall. Offsetting this visual outburst is an orderly display of cutout portrait heads of some of the artist’s moral heroes—Che Guevara, Aung San Suu Kyi, Hilary Clinton, Bruce Lee, Laozi, and others.

The complexity of Song’s vision places her in dialogue with other practitioners of global contemporary papercutting. Her work is edgier than that of Britain’s comforting Rob Ryan—the paper strips in some of Song’s earlier innocuous-seeming compositions were cut from porn magazines—but not as directly confrontational as Kara Walker’s classic antiracist silhouette nightmares. Song’s installations, which fill and animate large spaces, resonate with the cardboard extravaganzas of Thomas Hirsh, and both artists owe a debt to the modernist master Kurt Schwitters and his legendary Merzbau. Jess and many other 20th century collagists are clearly antecedents, and some viewers might detect a hint of painter Charles Burchfield in Song’s jittery, vibrating way of constructing organic forms.

In her opening-night performance, Song will rapidly, volcanically, fill an entire wall with cut and pinned paper. This galvanizing act, a living mélange of materiality and force, combines elements of Western performance art and Happenings with the longstanding East Asian belief that an artist can be a medium for the flow of the cosmic-organic energy known as qi.

Xin Song studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1994. She has exhibited in galleries such as Cheryl McGinnis and Cynthia Reeves in New York and in institutions like the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, the Paper Art Biennial at the National Art Gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria, the Chengdu Biennale in China, the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York. She has also done public art installations in venues including MTA subway stations, the Flatiron Building, Rockefeller Center, and the Garment District Broadway Plaza, all in New York. Among her awards are a Provincetown Fellowship and grants from the Puffin Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Richard Vine is the former managing editor of Art in America and author of such studies as New China, New art and Odd nerdrum: paintings, sketches, and drawings, as well as the artworld crime novel SoHo sins.