Waste Not

Waste Not (Chinese: 物尽其用; pinyin: Wù jìn qí yòng) is an exhibit by Chinese artist Song Dong that displays over 10,000 domestic objects formerly owned by his late mother, who refused to throw anything away if she could possibly reuse it. She had suffered poverty during China's turmoils in the 1950s and 1960s and had acquired a habit of thrift and re-use that led her to store domestic objects of all kinds in her tiny house in Beijing. After the death of her husband in 2002, her desire to hoard items became an obsession that began to affect her standard of living. Song and his sister managed to alleviate it by persuading her to let him use her possessions as an art installation, reflecting her life and the modern history of China as experienced by one family. First exhibited in Beijing in 2005, Waste Not has since travelled around the world to major galleries in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, where it has been well received by critics.

Song Dong is a Chinese artist who is often described as a practitioner of conceptual art, focusing on ideas as much as physical materials. He was born in 1966 during the Cultural Revolution and lived through the turmoil that accompanied the development of modern China. He worked as a painter until the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, following which he switched to performance, video and photography after a hiatus of several years.

Born in 1938, Song Dong's mother Zhao Xiangyuan was a member of a prosperous family that fell on hard times after Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China in 1949. His maternal grandfather was an officer in the Kuomintang (KMT), the nationalist party that ruled much of China from 1928 until its retreat to Taiwan in 1949 after being defeated by the Communist Party of China during the Chinese Civil War. He served with the KMT in the Second Sino-Japanese War. In 1950, his grandparents and his mother moved to Beijing but in 1953 his grandfather was arrested and imprisoned for several years on charges of being a spy for the KMT. His grandmother died of cancer in 1961, having brought up the family in his grandfather's absence. The repeated natural and man-made disasters suffered by China in the 1950s and 1960s, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, claimed the lives of millions of Chinese and drove Song Dong's family into poverty. His father, Song Shiping, was sent to a re-education camp for several years during the Cultural Revolution and did not return to Zhao or the younger Song until 1978.

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