Song Dong

Song Dong (, born 1966) is a Chinese contemporary artist, active in sculpture, installations, performance, photography and video. He has been involved in many solo and group exhibitions around the world, covering a range of themes and topics including his relationship with his family and their experience of living in modern China (the topic of his widely exhibited installation Waste Not), the transformation of China's urban environment and the impermanence of change.

Early life and career Song Dong was born in Beijing in 1966 to a family that was once prosperous but was reduced to poverty by China's repeated upheavals. His father Song Shiping was caught up in the Cultural Revolution and was one of the millions of Chinese people sent to a re-education camp for supposedly being a "counter-revolutionary". The younger Song was raised by his mother, Zhao Xiangyuan.

Song was an enthusiastic artist from an early age and began painting with the encouragement of his mother – though his father was not so supportive – and first trained in oil painting. He graduated in 1989 from the Fine Arts Department of Capital Normal University in Beijing, In 1992, he married a fellow artist, Yin Xiuzhen. The two turned their back on their academic training and turned to avant garde and experimental art forms including performance and video.

Artistic themes

Several of Song Dong's works have conveyed a theme of the impermanence of change, highlighting the way that although a single person could effect a minor change it could only have a fleeting impact. In 1995 he began writing a daily diary on a flat piece of stone using clear water rather than ink, so that the letters would disappear as he wrote them. He subsequently visited Tibet, where he photographed himself striking the Lhasa River with an old-style Chinese seal. The following year, he visited Tiananmen Square in Beijing on a freezing New Year's Eve to create the piece Breathing, showing himself lying face-down on the ground for 40 minutes until his breath had created a temporary sheet of ice on the pavement. He repeated the same thing on a frozen lake in a Beijing park that made no impression on the existing sheet of ice. As of 2012, it has so far been displayed in eight cities around the world.

Artwork This artwork is about Song Dong projected an image of his hand onto his father's body with a projector. Starting from his father's face, the hand swept all across his father's body slowly and stopped at heart. Song Dong believes that there is a generation gap between him and his father. However, he always wants to express his love to his father. During that time, a Chinese father usually acts as an emperor of the family. The relationship between father and son was normally like a ruler and subject. His father declined him whenever Song Dong request to touch his father. In the end, Song Dong tells his father: "I will be famous if you let me finish this artwork." These words influenced his father's opinion and allowed him to finish the artwork. At that moment, Song Dong realized that his father sacrificed his dignity and authority as a father for his son's success and future.

Another artwork Song Dong created is called doing nothing garden, this installation is a 6 meters tall mound piled with organic trash, and is fully covered by grass and flowers. It had been exhibited in Kassel Germany for Documenta 13 exhibition in 2010-2012. This artwork discusses about doing things: doing nothing rather than doing something, doing nothing leads to creating something. His work has a sense of helplessness to change the nature and society that human has limited power to change the nature. After the exhibition, Song Dong removes everything and no more garden remains, just like human doing so much work to protect nature, but nothing changes.