Boundless

Song Dong: I Don’t Know the Mandate of Heaven
Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai
21.01.17 – 04.06.17

Translated by Richard Dobson

The first time I heard about Song Dong was in a book by the educationalist Wu Hong, titled Waste Not: Art for the Common People. It was about Song Dong’s exhibition, Waste Not, and how it demonstrated the three-tiered relationship between people, between things, and between people and things. I was very curious, but also very dismayed. The more than 10,000 everyday items collected by Song Dong’s mother had been arranged into a large square formation. These everyday items connected the traces and warmth of the time spent together with loved ones and bore the understanding and respect for lives lived during times of deprivation. Waste Not seemed more like a display of memories of a bygone era. And as I am a very nostalgic person, Song Dong’s works have always evoked the deepest memories in my heart. ‘Art is life, life is art.’ This concept is the best way of interpreting Song Dong. From his earliest creative work, Breathing, to his later works, Touching My Father and Do Nothing, his performance art and his installations have been inseparable from his life.

The title of this exhibition, I Don’t Know the Mandate of Heaven, is taken from the Analects of Confucius, which won recognition as a philosophical work during the Song dynasty, and is a contradictory take on the line, ‘At fifty, I knew the mandate of heaven.’ Song Dong uses this to define the course of his own life and artistic creativity up to the present. Some people might think that he always uses trivial and obscure methods to retell the lives and emotional states of the members of a Chinese family. By viewing the world in a moderate, level-headed way, he can see the ‘wisdom of the poor’ all around him. This is not all, as Song Dong’s works have a unique charm, but it shows the close attention he pays to life and traditional culture. And although young Chinese artists have been very active in exhibitions abroad in recent years, Song Dong’s artistic concepts are significantly different from those of other artists. His work provides a more sensitive response to the rapid changes in today’s society and shows a keen instinct for formal and technical innovation. Not only does it bear witness to the realities of contemporary Chinese art; its individual artistic approach is ideally suited to coping with the changing times.

I Don’t Know the Mandate of Heaven is presented in a kind of boundless state. It includes Song Dong’s performance art pieces, videos, installations, photographs, paintings and many other forms of works from 1992 onwards. For the artist, this is not a retrospective solo exhibition but gives a new definition to his work. By adopting this open-ended approach, he is able to engage in a process of self-examination, in accordance with the dual concepts of ‘all things are teachers’ and ‘all things are a mirror’, and this can lead, in turn, to new ways of thinking and new understandings about life and art. He is very good at using his works to tell a story. Those stories about everyday and simple things always resonate with the viewer and inspire thought. He believes that ‘any media can be called new media, as even if the original methods that he uses have been used before, they end up looking new, when they’re used in a work in a new way’. From the early Waste Not, to The Wisdom of the Poor, to Surplus Value, to today’s I Don’t Know the Mandate of Heaven, all Song Dong’s exhibitions are concerned with constructing a relationship based on a general perception of time, new and old.

There is an intertextual relationship between the hundreds of works Song Dong has created: the new and the old are brought into dialogue with each other. This relationship is also very close to his understanding and definition of creativity. So I don’t perceive I Don’t Know the Mandate of Heaven as a purely fragmentary exhibition. It is a collection of events, and opens up a space in which the viewing public can participate. For example, on the first floor, the Mirror Hall can exist as an independent work, but it also coexists with another work, The Use of Uselessness: Bottle Rack Big Brother. While each work is viewed independently, the format of this exhibition means that it still forms one part of the whole, and uses a new way of examining old things, as well as new ones. When I think about the element of public participation in the work, I have to mention Eating the City. Song Dong spent many days building this in collaboration with the public, yet, as this was an artwork made to be eaten, it disappeared within the brief space of a few days. Encountering such a work, the public felt relaxed and were free to pick out and eat what they wanted. They could also share it with those around them. A ‘city’, in the minds of everyone participating in this game, quickly vanished. This work strongly illustrated the herd mentality of society as a whole, and presented a microcosm of social behaviour. In each of the spaces in the current exhibition, we can see how Song Dong allows for each work to be redefined and understood in a different way.

Song Dong is an artist who can draw strength from the past. It’s as if every one of his works has a unique personal feeling that can draw in the viewer from outside. His works give expression to a solid sense of life and enter into communion with our souls. They speak the language of individual experience and the boundlessness of universal feelings. Song Dong became renowned through his work Breathing, twenty years ago, and most of his works are indissolubly interconnected with his life. Most of them are performance art pieces or installations. In the way that he links life and art, Song Dong uses art to make observations on life, and art to create life; he uses a kind of personal form of expression as a way of dealing with misfortune. At the core of his artistic creation is the idea of ‘having’ and ‘not having’. For him, these two propositions represent different sides of the coin: to have is a great deal of nothing, and to have not is to have it all. At 30, I wasn’t established; At 40, I was perplexed; At 50, I don’t know the mandate of heaven: these are works from across the different stages of Song Dong’s life, each a new description of the course his life has taken. It is especially worth mentioning that At 50, I don’t know the mandate of heaven was created especially for this exhibition and uses fifty dolls modelled on himself. In thedifferent shapes I see memories of a peaceful life, when he was a child. Seeing his more classic works leaves one feeling more ambivalent, like being able to grasp the very essence of the work, while the work itself seems unable to grasp the implications.

The entire exhibition space at the Rockbund Art Museum, including the structure of the building itself and the internal and external walls, has become an expression of Song Dong’s creative voyage of discovery until the present time. The new context has given both past and new works a new vitality, and this backdrop has also increasingly enabled the artist’s own reflections and understanding of the creative principle to develop. His artistic view overall is maturing, and his works increasingly exude a sense of peace and calm. In the modern world, people pursue the changing moods of the time, but where is the spiritual essence? Ultimately, why do we need contemporary art? What contemporary Chinese art embodies the spirit of the time? What kind of creative language can it employ, in the midst of the current plethora of artistic forms and themes? Should art refer back to history or focus on reality? Art that carries the spiritual connotations of humanism, rationalism and universalism is always referred to as contemporary Chinese art. And artists’ levels of achievement often depend on their unique artistic language, as well as the extent and depth of their human enquiry. ‘Art’ is often difficult to define: what can and can’t be called ‘art’ differs among artists, who don’t share the same outlook. For Song Dong, art and life are often boundless, and life is the best kind of art.