Song Dong
| Song Dong | |
|---|---|
Song Dong
(Courtesy of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco) |
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| Born | 1966 (age 50–51) Beijing, China |
| Nationality | Chinese |
| Notable work | Waste Not, Breathing, Touching My Father |
| Spouse(s) | Yin Xiuzhen |
| Awards | Grand Award, Gwanju Biennale 2006 |
Song Dong (Chinese: 宋冬, 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.
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, and abruptly ceased his painting after the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. 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.
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.
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