Beijing-based artist Dong Song with some of his family heirlooms
It may be rubbish in most people’s eyes but for Beijing-based artist Dong Song these items are valuable family heirlooms because of the memorable stories they tell.
On December 13, Dong Song brought his latest work Waste Not to Sydney for an exhibition that opens at Carriageworks on January 5. Arriving in Australia following his highly acclaimed exhibitions in London and New York, the artist spent most of this month installing 10,000 household items collected by his mother in China over the past 50 years.
“I thought the collections were rubbish and I always threw them away until 2002. I visited my mother more often after that to tidy up the domestic collections for Waste Not with her,” Song said.
Frame and items from his mother’s house
This exhibition is different from the first display in Beijing because Song has now lost his mother and installs the collections with his sister, wife and daughter.
“My parents are not here now but in my art I can still feel their presence,” Song said, the emotion evident in his voice.
In 2002, Song’s father passed away suddenly. The grief paralysed his mother and to jolt her out of her sadness the artist encouraged her to help him organise the massive collections she had treasured for decades.
“I had deep dialogues with my mother when we worked together, which had never happened before. She told me the stories behind her collections. The more we talked about the items – everything ranging from shoes and bottles to small pieces of paper – the less I wanted to throw them away,” he said.
Song has exhibited his mother’s treasures worldwide since 2005 and he always displays a stack of soap in a prominent position. The bars of soap are dry and hard. Song calls them stones and refused to accept them as a wedding gift from his mother in 1992.
These bars of soap are now treasured for the love they revealed
“I use a washing machine now and I don’t want these ‘stones’,” Song had rejecting her gift. He didn’t understand why his mother collected these ‘stones’ until he started to prepare Waste Not with her.
During their chats, Song for the first time understood the lives of his parents’ generation who had lived through China’s most turbulent times.
In the early 1960s, people suffered from natural disasters as well as social turmoil, which led to serious shortages of food and products. Under the harsh conditions, each family could only buy one bar of soap with coupons assigned by the Chinese authorities.
Song said: “My mother collected soap and clothes for me and my siblings in the hope we could have an easier life in the future. When I discovered this story, the items became very valuable. In my mind, it is not simply soap and clothing; they represent the love that my mother had for me.”
The work of building Waste Not, at the beginning, was consolation for Song’s mother to help her overcome the loss of her husband. But seven years later, for Song it became a tribute to the mother who fell off a ladder trying to save a bird, and then passed away.
“You didn’t tell me the story behind this,” Song once said to an item in Waste Not when he was missing his mother.
Art has become an indispensable part of Song’s life for it provides a channel that allows him to continue his dialogue with his mother and, for the first time, it allowed him to get close to his father.
Song describes his father as a serious man, a king in his family who had to be obeyed. But the strained relationship between the artist and his father had a favourable turn when Song was 30 and had the opportunity to exhibit in Germany for one month.
“It was my first trip to Europe and my English was zero. I felt dumb which made me helpless and extremely homesick,” Song said.
Medical supplies stored over the years
The trip made the artist rethink the relationship with his parents, especially with his father.
“I was very afraid of my father and it was hard to touch him with my hands. So I came up with an artistic way to show my love. I recorded the image of my hand touching the air and intended to cast the image onto my father’s body,” Song explained.
But after his father refused Song’s idea several times, the artist realised that the only way to persuade his father was to convince him that this exhibition would make his son famous.
Finally, the father relented and showed up in Song’s Touching Father exhibition. For the first time, Song felt that his king touched him and supported him like a normal father.
“I cast the image of my hand onto his heart. At first he looked at my hand, then took off his jacket and then his shirt; at the end he was half naked. We did not talk but he could feel my hand there, touching his heart. After the exhibition, our relationship changed,” Song said.
Asked to define good art, Song said for him it is whatever helps him to communicate with his family.
