Song Dong
Song Dong , abbreviation宋 冬 (* 1966 in Beijing ), is a Chinese visual artist who expresses himself through sculpture , installation , performance , photography and video art . He is considered a representative of conceptual art .
Life
Song (family name) was born in Beijing. His father († 2002) was an engineer who had been put in a re-education camp for alleged counterrevolutionary activity during the Chinese Cultural Revolution . Song was raised above all by his mother Zhao Xiangyuan (1938–2009), a child from a formerly wealthy family who encouraged him and his sister Hui to paint and developed an obsessive “collecting mania” with increasing age . Her apartment was in town, tiny and full of household items. Song studied until 1989 at the Department of Fine Arts at Capital Normal University in Beijing. The violent suppression of the popular uprising in Tian'anmen Square was a decisive experience for him. The event led to his giving up painting , which he had studied. Together with fellow artist Yin Xiuzhen (* 1963), whom he married in 1992, he turned to the avant-garde in the visual arts and tried out experimental forms of art, such as performances and video art. Song lives and works in Beijing.
Works and exhibitions (selection)
- 1994: Throwing a Stone , painted and lettered stone
- 1996: Breathing , action on Tian'anmen Square, Beijing
- 1997: Touching My Father , video about the distant relationship with his father
- 2003 to 2006: Eating the City , installation, set up in Barcelona, Beijing, Hong Kong, London, Oxford and Shanghai
- 2005 to today: Waste Not , installation made from the parents' obsessively collected household items, set up in Beijing and other locations in Canada, the United States and Great Britain, also in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
- 2009: Projects 90 , Museum of Modern Art , New York City
- 2010: A Blot in the Landscape , series of videos, Beijing
- 2012: Doing Nothing Garden , Land Art installation in the form of planted hills made of garbage soil (supplemented by Chinese characters that refer to thoughts from Daodejing ), Karlsaue , dOCUMENTA (13) , Kassel
- 2015/16: Life is Art, Art is Life - Retrospective Groninger Museum , Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
- 2016: Chinese Whispers , Zentrum Paul Klee , Bern, Switzerland
Awards
- 2000: Unesco / Aschberg Bursary Laureate
- 2006: Grand Award at the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea
literature
- Gareth Harris: The Rapidly Changing Face of Chinese Art . In: Financial Times , August 13, 2015, p. 9
- Claire Rigby: Song Dong: Regenerate . In: Art Review Asia , Spring 2015, p. 109
- Eva Scharrer: Song Dong . In: dOKUMENTA (13). The accompanying book / The Guidebook . Publisher Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2012, p. 306 f.
Web links
- Song Dong at Google Arts & Culture
- Song Dong , website in the portal kunsthalle-duesseldorf.de
- Song Dong, selected one-artist exhibitions , website in the portal pacegallery.com
- Chiu-Ti Jansen: The Art of Doing Nothing in Contemporary China: Song Dong at Pace Gallery , website from February 20, 2013 in the portal sothebys.com
- Vanessa Badagliacca: Doing and Nothing. An exploration of Song Dong's Doing Nothing Garden and the possibility of renewing ourselves and our environment through not doing . Website from May 21, 2014 in the zeteojournal.com portal
- Song Dong. The Chinese artist in Düsseldorf , video (4:38 min) by Ulrike Maria Haak, Kulturzeit , 3sat , December 11, 2015
Individual evidence
- ↑ Holland Cotter: The Collected Ingredients of a Beijing Life . Article dated July 14, 2009 in the nytimes.com portal , accessed on December 13, 2015
- ↑ Doing Nothing Garden , short documentation of the installation (video in portal youtube.com , 1:21 min)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Song, dong |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Chinese visual artist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1966 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Beijing |