Chinese artist, Song Dong was born and currently lives and works in Beijing, China. He explores cultural and social issues through performance art, video installation, calligraphy, sculpture, and site-specific projects. The first time I saw one of Dong’s pieces was at the MoMA this past summer. He had an installation piece on the second floor titled “Waste Not.” “The installation exposes the contents of his mother’s home acquired over 50 years, during which the Chinese concept of wu jin qi yong, or waste not was a prerequisite for survival.” (Excerpt taken from a Q&A with Dong). The installation included several empty tubes of toothpaste, buttons, watches, cups, Styrofoam containers, and tons of other miscellaneous objects. This installation took over the entire second floor and was very amusing and confusing at the same time. The whole time that I was circling the outer perimeter of the piece, I was trying to decipher the importance of all of these daily objects that were now being put on display for the New York population. This was his first US based show and he made quite a name and place for himself in one of the fine art capitols of the world. He has been noted as a significant figure in the development of Chinese conceptual art since the early 1990’s and the US can only gain from our neighbors across the seas. In 2005 when he installed this piece for Beijing Tokyo Art Projects, he created a book depicting the entire collection of items. This installation took a large team of people to assemble and place each item in its exact position.
Dong has had exhibitions in several places around the world including London, Beijing, Germany, Korea, and the United States. In 1998 he was included in the “Inside Out: New Chinese Art” that is organized by the Asia Society Galleries, in 1998 the “Transcience: Chinese Art at the End of the 20th Century” organized by a museum in Chicago, Illinois and in 2002 he participated in the Gwangju Biennale. Also in 2002, he took part in the Fourth Asia-Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia.
Dong is known for his intelligent performances and has been said to be an artist “emerging from a strong Beijing-based avant-garde performance art community.” His performance titled “Stamping the Water” performed in 1996 is a series of 36 photographs that records him stamping the sacred waters of the Lhasa River, Tibet with a wooden seal. His means of documentation and presentation reminded me heavily of my recent practices when dealing with the many questions that come about with performance art and how to display it.
“Jump” from 1999 is a performance of Dong jumping up and down in front of the Forbidden City in Beijing. He performs this act of jumping in the middle of a crowd of people who either don’t seem to notice him or don’t seem to care that he is there. He also uses video as a means of documenting some of his work and he spoke quite interestingly about why he uses this medium on occasions. “The medium of video is elemental. It produces moving images and sounds that cannot be touched. It has no shape but provides a strong light and can be projected onto any object.” He used this enthusiasm for video on his personal project titled “Touching My Father” that was completed in 1998. Here he projected onto his father’s body a video image of his own hand. Dong was touching on issues of father and son contact and the lack there of during his adolescence and on. In the Chinese culture it is not traditional or acceptable to hug or embrace in any sort of way. This is something that seems hard for Dong to move around as he has used this concept to drive several of his personal pieces.
One of his pieces that I thought seemed interesting and more than what was said about it was his ongoing piece titled “Water Diary” that was started in 1995 and is still continuing today. When Dong was younger his father encouraged him to use stone and water to practice his calligraphy as to not waste the precious papers and inks; to conserve the resources since there were expensive and there were other ways to practice the art. Now, he uses this memory from his childhood as power for one of his ongoing piece that includes him privately writing down his diary entries on a stone with water each day and photographing it. “It became a way to release his emotions in absolute privacy, leaving no trace.” This act, while it is very public in that stones outdoors are public domain also has a unique secret ness to it as well. It interests me that he has been writing for all these years now and building an enormous collection of these images of his writings in water on rocks. I think that rocks.
When I saw his work at the MoMA I felt like we had some of the same aesthetics and thoughts on things. I felt very similar to him and I was unaware of his other work which turns out reminds me more of me than his piece at the MoMA did. The idea that you can take something out of every day life, create a concept, and put it on display is something I think of every day and I feel like Dong works very much in the same way. It was cool to see someone who does performance work document it similarly to my means of documentation and also using some of the same compositions I use as well.
MoMA article
"How Lattidues Become Forms" Article
"Waste Not" Installation Article
Q&A with Song Dong
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