Song Dong: Usefulness of Uselessness, Pace Seoul, December 7, 2017–February 14, 2018. The Borderless Wall, Fei Gallery, Guangzhou, December 18, 2017–March 5, 2018. Song Dong: Same Bed Different Dreams, Pace Gallery, London, October 1–November 5, 2019. Song Dong: Smashing the Limit of the Mirror, Pace Live, 540 West 25th Street, New York, November 2–9, 2019. Song Dong: Window - Mirror, Pace Gallery, Hong Kong, September 17–October 28, 2021. Song Dong: ROUND, Pace Gallery, New York, July 14–August 19, 2023.Īnnealing, Museum of Glass, Shanghai, China, April 29–October 8, 2023. Themes of consumption, poverty, and globalization are examined and presented as a means to inspire dialogue and participation.ġ985–1989, Capital Normal University, Beijing, BA Song’s practice encompasses performance, installation, video, sculpture, painting, and calligraphy, often combining mediums within a single work. Ranging from bottle caps, shoes, blankets, toothpaste tubes, metal pots, and toys the installation becomes a meditation on consumption and the archive. 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. In 2005, Song created the installation Waste Not as an act of physical and psychological unpacking. 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. 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. 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. 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. In addition, the work of Robert Rauschenberg had a profound impact on his practice and contributed to his abandonment of painting in favor of video and performance. He was acutely aware of the 85 New Wave movement during this time, which proposed a radical turn toward expressive and experimental innovations. Song was introduced to painting and calligraphy at a young age, which ultimately led him to study painting. His projects are often composed with quotidian objects and ephemera, proposing a destabilization of material hierarchies in relationship to personal and global themes. Song Dong, a key figure in Chinese contemporary art, explores themes of memory, self-expression, impermanence, and the transience of human endeavors.
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