Song Dong

titled in Chinese, signed in Chinese and Pinyin, dated 1996, and numbered 5/12 on the reverse, framed

alternate edition exhibited:
USA, New York, Chambers Fine Art, The Way of Chopsticks: Song Dong and
Yin Xiuzhen, 2002, p. 25
France, Paris, Centre Pompidou, Alors, la Chine?, 2003, p. 289
USA, New York, International Center of Photography and the Asia Society, Seattle Art Museum; London, Victoria and Albert Museum; Berlin, Haus der Kulturen der Welt; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Durham, Duke University, Nasher Museum of Art, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, June 2004 - February 2007, p. 132
USA, New York, The Asia Society; San Francisco Museum of Art; The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; Monterrey, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo; Seattle, The Henry Art Gallery, Inside Out: New Chinese Art, 1998 – 2000

Lü Peng, 90's Art China 1990-1999, Hunan, 2000, p. 261
Exh. Cat., Paris, Espace Cardin, Paris-Pékin, October 2002, p. 46
Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen: Chopsticks, Chambers Fine Art, New York, USA, 2002, p. 132
Paris-Pékin: Exposition, Beaux Arts Collection, Turin, Italy, 2002, pp. 20-21
Jean-Marc Decrop and Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Modernités chinoises, Skira, 2003, p. 35
Britta Erickson, ed., China Onward: The Estella Collection, Chinese Contemporary Art, 1966 - 2006, Humlebaeck, Denmark, 2007, pp. 262-265
Performance Art in China:  Site and the Body, Artist Publishing Co. Taipei, Taiwan, 2010, p. 101

This set of works is generally in good condition. Please note that they were not examined under ultraviolet light and out of their frames.
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First exhibited in Beijing in 2005, Waste Not was a large scale installation by Chinese artist Song Dong devoted to the remembrance of his mother and the previous Chinese generation. The work was extremely well received and later traveled to Gwuangju Biennale, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Barbican Art Gallery in London, making Song Dong one of the most renowned Chinese contemporary artists in recent years. The two works, Breathing and Hitting the Water, are both important documentations of his early performances that are rarely seen together in the auction market, and are thus extremely precious.

Breathing (Lot 1001) documented a performance by Song Dong in January 1996 in Tiananmen and Houhai in Beijing. With photos taken by his wife and artist Yin Xiuzhen, the work is the most well-known piece by Song, frequently representing the artist’s oeuvre across numerous group shows. Lying on the ground of the Tiananmen Square under minus nine degree, Song Dong exhaled for fourty minutes, ultimately creating a thin layer of ice on the square. There were four audience members: his wife and three soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army. The next morning, Song Dong continued his performance at the Houhai Lake in Beijing’s city center. This time the lake remained completely unaffected. Song has said, “The ice remains as ice.” As the symbol of political control in China, Tiananmen Square has frequently been seen as the gathering place for political and cultural movements.  It is therefore easy for many to associate Breathing with underlying political implications, transcending the work beyond its original meaning; interpreting the work as the current scenario and feeling from the Chinese people towards their country. However, for the artist, it is merely a documentation of a performance. Famous Chinese art historian Wu Hung once written: “It reminds us that in 1996 the square still remained an unfeeling monolith. Breathing not only represents a continuing effort to challenge this monolithic power but also demonstrates the extreme difficulty of making any change: all Song Dong’s effort produced was a tiny pool of ice, which disappeared before the next morning.”

Song Dong’s artistic practice ranges across many different media. In 2002, he and Yin Xiuzhen held a joint exhibition entitled “Chopsticks” in Chambers Fine Art in New York. In the accompanying catalogue, Wu Hung has called the essence of Song’s works to be “vernacular modernist”. Born and raised in Beijing, Song taught at a local high school after his graduation. For him, the highest form of intelligence lies within the human mind. Many of his works thus juxtapose the human figure against greater power, whether it would be political or natural power, as exemplified in these works. Song Dong works in a variety of medium and approaches, although he is mainly known for his experimentation in photography and video. The still and moving images in large serve as documentation of his performance art, further raising the medium into the high art realm.

Asides from Breathing, Song Dong’s interest in the water also seeps through most of his other works in the mid- 1990s, including Water Diary (from 1995 to the present). Water Diary documented the artist’s performance, which was to write his diary with water and a brush on a piece of rock repeatedly. Water’s poetic quality becomes the intellectual medium of art. The simple act is deeply rooted in the Zen belief of Buddhism and local Beijing tradition, as can be seen in the local parks where the elderly practices their calligraphy by writing with water on the sidewalk pavement. The perseverance in Song’s practice certainly reminds one of the, though short, but persistent daily ritual of painting in the Date Painting by Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara. 

The thirty six panels Stamping the Water (Lot 1003) is another work by Song to explore on the medium of water produced especially for the project “Healing the Waters Project” curated by American artist Betsy Damon. Spanning only three days from August 31 to September 2 in 1996 in Lhasa, Tibet, the project invited over twenty artists from China, America and Switzerland to create works based on the theme of water. Song Dong’s Stamping the Water was one of the few works that truly exerted an influential position. In the work, Song Dong stood in a meditative posture in the freezing Lhasa River and repeatedly stamped it with a large wooden stamp carved with the Chinese character shui (water). The stamp and the river together created a paradox: because the river ceaselessly flowed and changed, the stamping was destined to be futile. The sense of fading is imbued with a poetic vibe that exceeds far beyond the disappearing of text in the Water Diary. Attempting to concretise the river into the “water” character, one can see the artist’s questioning of the foundation of our surrounding and system. Looking from the surface, Song Dong’s recent works began to lean towards the vernacular wit of the Chinese people, but Breathing and Stamping the Water along with other early works certainly showcase the powerful drive within the humble artist’s mind.