ART-PRESENTATION: Song Dong-Same Bed Different Dreams

Exploring themes of memory, self-expression, impermanence, and the transience of human endeavors, Song Dong is a key figure in Chinese contemporary art. His projects are often composed with quotidian objects and ephemera, proposing a destabilization of material hierarchies in relationship to personal and global themes.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

Conceived as a survey exhibition, “Same Bed Different Dreams”, this is the artist’s first opportunity to present significant works from 1995 to the present day in the UK. For three decades, Song Dong has been at the forefront of Chinese contemporary art. Song Dong was introduced to painting and calligraphy at a young age, which ultimately led him to study painting. He was acutely aware of the 85 New Wave movement during this time, which proposed a radical turn toward expressive and experimental innovations. One of Song’s earliest performance “Another Lesson: Do You Want to Play with Me?” (1994), questioned the roles of educational institutions, transforming the Central Academy of Fine Arts Gallery into a classroom in which exam papers covered the walls and floor, middle-school students were instructed to read blank textbooks, and participants were invited to write on surrounding blackboards. The performance was shut down within half an hour of its opening by the police, who accused the artist of inciting the public and creating a fire hazard. “Same Bed Different Dreams” refers to Song Dong’s continual return to the same core ideas via a variety of methods. His practice embraces a wide range of media; performance, photography, video, sculpture, installation and calligraphy, often within a single work. Song’s radical approach blurs the lines between past and present, fact and memory, humour and trauma. In “Broken Mirror” (1999) and “Crumpling Shanghai” (2000), Song Dong uses video to capture the impermanent. Everyday street scenes in China unfolds, with passersby going about their business, only for their reflection in a mirror or their projection on a piece of paper, to be smashed or crumpled by the hand of the artist. With these destructive acts, Song comments on the rampant industrial growth of the modern city he is concerned with the fragility of things, of the fast-paced world that feels increasingly impossible to hold on to. Much like the rapid build and destruction of his edible cities, Song‘s video works and performance photographs such as “Writing Time with Water Beijing” (1995) seek to capture a fleeting moment in a world of constant change. Always working with the humblest of materials, Song Dong constructs installations using the detritus of old Beijing. Discarded furniture, and parts of demolished courtyard homes can all be easily identified in Song Dong’s most recent body of works. Taking centerstage in the exhibition, “Same Bed Different Dreams No. 3” (2018) has been created using everyday household objects, such as crockery, pendant lights and decorative knick-knacks. These mundane objects are presented on a double bed carrying the memory of the rise of his generation, behind a polished case composed of salvaged window panels, the useless byproduct of modernization. “Edible Penjing No.1 to 4“ (2000), is a set of documentary photographs taken before the interactive performance of the same title, held at Gasworks, London in 2000. These images remain the only remnants of the edible sceneries after audience gluttonized them. In imitation of traditional painting and Penjing (bonsai) art in China, Song used basic foodstuffs such as salmon, chicken thighs, minced meat and broccoli to create four miniature landscapes, accompanied by calligraphic inscriptions intentionally written in crude brushstrokes. In the “Mandala” (2015) series, Song Dong takes inspiration from “Mandala”, the Buddhist ritual where a circular image is created in a painstaking process of laying down granules of crushed coloured stone in an intricate pattern, only to be swept away once completed. Song subverts this tradition by creating his Mandalas using pulses, seeds and spices from around the world. The use of seasoning as a medium exemplifies how Song elevates both the everyday and the ephemeral to the status of high art. Coinciding with exhibition , Pace Live will present a weeklong screening of video works and films that document his ongoing performance practice from the 1990s to the present. Among the works featured in the presentation are “Broken Mirror” (1999 and “Touching My Father” (1998).

Info: Pace Gallery, 6 Burlington Gardens, London, Duration: 1/10-5/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, & Pace Live, 540 West 25th Street, New York, Duration 2-9/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com