Song Dong, Waste Not (2005), photo courtesy Groninger Museum

The Groninger Museum in the Netherlands has gained an enormous installation, filling up much of their open space with the household items and various collectibles of Waste Not, the collaborative installation created between Chinese contemporary artist Song Dong and his mother, Zhao Xiangyuan.  The work is centered around the artist’s mother, who dealt with numerous hardships during her upbringing in China, and how she began to cherish and hoard all of the objects, detritus and material she acquired during the course of her lifetime. (more…)

Song Dong, Facing the Wall (1999), via PACE Gallery

On view at both of Pace Gallery’s New York exhibition spaces is an exhibition of work by Chinese artist Song Dong, compiling the artist’s recent work from dOCUMENTA 13 and the Kiev Biennial, as well as older work.

Song Dong, Doing Nothing Mountains (2011-2012), via PACE Gallery (more…)

Installation view of “Waste Not” via NY Times

From June 24, 2009 through September 7, 2009 the Museum of Modern Art  displays their “Project 90,” featuring Beijing-native conceptual artist Song Dong. It is a solo exhibition installation entitled, “Waste Not” (or Wu jin qi gong in Chinese). The piece, done in collaboration between Song Dong and his mother, Zhao Xiang Yuan, was initially unveiled at the Beijing Hua Lang in 2005, and has since traveled to Guangzhou Biennale, the Berlin World Culture Pavilion, as well as the New Art Gallery in Walsall England. “Waste Not” is composed of ordinarily used objects collected by his mother over the span of fifty years,  such as pans, plates, buttons, pens, tubes, shirts, buttons, basins, toothpaste and even the original wooden frame of his mother’s home. The moving installation, which occupies 3,000 square feet of the MoMa’s Atrium, is a reconstruction of his parents’ house, which was taken over by Urban Planning in China. Dong’s piece is symbolic of a time when his mother, plagued by poverty, had to abide by the “waste not” dictum as a “prerequisite for survival.”

Projects 90: Song Dong [Museum Of Modern Art]
The Collected Ingredients of Beijing Life [The New York Times]
Song Dong: Between Conservation and Change [Culturebase]
Private Collection [New Yorker]
What a load of quite unmissable rubbish [Telegraph]

(more…)