Song Dong is a contemporary Chinese artist and sculptor. He explores themes of memory, self-expression, impermanence, and the transience of human endeavors.
Background
Song Dong was born in 1966, in Beijing, China. His family used to be prosperous but was reduced to poverty by China's repeated upheavals. His mother, Zhao Xiangyuan, came from a wealthy family that lost everything after one of its members was jailed as an anti-Communist spy. His father, Song Shiping, trained as an engineer, spent seven years in forced labor after being accused of counterrevolutionary activity. Purely to survive, his parents adhered to the Cultural Revolutionary dictum of frugality in daily life, with his mother carrying conservation to extravagant lengths. Song was introduced to painting and calligraphy at a young age, which ultimately led him to study painting. His mother encouraged him, his father did not.
Education
Song Dong graduated from the Fine Arts Department of Capital Normal University in Beijing in 1989.
One of Song’s earliest performance pieces, Another Lesson: Do You Want to Play with Me? (1994), questioned the roles of educational institutions, transforming the Central Academy of Fine Arts Gallery into a classroom in which exam papers covered the walls and floor, middle-school students were instructed to read blank textbooks, and participants were invited to write on surrounding blackboards. The performance was shut down within half an hour of its opening by the police, who accused the artist of inciting the public and creating a fire hazard.
Song’s investigations of impermanence led him to create performances that he has revisited in ongoing iterations, such as Water Diary (1995-) wherein the artist documented his daily activity of writing in water on stone, only to watch it evaporate. Inspired by childhood memories of food scarcity, Song used the cultural significance of food as a means to inspire dialogue and participation in pieces such as Edible Pen Jing (Bonsai) (2000) and his later Eating the City series.
In 2005, Song created the installation Waste Not as an act of physical and psychological unpacking. Consisting of over ten thousand items accumulated by his mother over a span of five decades, Waste Not exists as a veritable landscape of commodities. Ranging from bottle caps, shoes, blankets, toothpaste tubes, metal pots, and toys the installation becomes a meditation on consumption and the archive.
Song has put on many solo shows around the world, including Projects 90, at the Museum of Modern Art in 2009 and A Blot in the Landscape at Pace Beijing in 2010. His first major retrospective in Europe was presented in 2015 at Groninger Museum and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. His group exhibitions include China Now, Alors Le Chine: Chinese Contemporary Art at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2003; Re-Imagining Asia HKW, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin in 2008, and at The New Art Gallery Walsall in 2009; and The 10th Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool in 2010. In 2012, Song contributed to the dOCUMENTA (13) exhibition at Kassel, Germany with his Do nothing garden.
Achievements
Song Dong's art achieved international recognition around the world. He is exhibited internationally. Song was awarded a UNESCO/ASCHBERG Bursary Laureate in 2000 and won the Grand Award at the Gwanju Biennale in South Korea in 2006.
Usefulness of Uselessness - Rectangular Window No. 9
2017
Bottle Rack Big Brother No. 2
2016
Mandala 006
2015
Glass Big Brother
2015
Edible Pen Jing
2015
Edible City
2015
Para-Pavilion
2011
Wisdom of the Poor: Living with the Tree
2005
Waste Not
2009
photography
Printing on Water (Performance in the Lhasa River, Tibet, 1996)
1996
72 Transmutations
1998
Father and Son in Ancestral Temple
1998
Breathing, Part 1 and Part 2
1996
Stamping the Water
1996
Writing Diary with Water
1996
Religion
When asked what God means to him Song Dong answered "I think my God is me. I can count on myself. I can decide myself. Other people cannot decide for me."
Views
Song’s practice encompasses performance, installation, video, sculpture, painting, and calligraphy, often combining mediums within a single work. Themes of consumption, poverty, and globalization are examined and presented as a means to inspire dialogue and participation.
Quotations:
"After 40 years of development of Chinese contemporary art, I think that it has formed its own unique set of values, ideas, and methodologies. China maintains a strong cultural tradition, though we are living in an era of globalization, where the world has become a small global village, so the fusion between different cultures is very extensive. I suppose that Chinese contemporary art is constantly moved forward by this development."
Connections
In 1992 Song Dong married a fellow artist, Yin Xiuzhen. They have a daughter Song ErRui.
