Catching Moonbeams in Water - Leng Lin on Song Dong at the Beijing Commune

Song Dong has been making art for over ten years now. Ever since his work Another Lesson, Do You Want to Play with Me?, Song Dong has been actively participating in the contemporary art movement in China. In this work integrating installation, video, painting and performance, Song Dong combined his creative abilities while also fully exploiting his job as a high school teacher of Chinese art. This he did by both participating in the development of contemporary art in China and by distributing this love of art to others.

Catching Moonbeams in Water – Leng Lin on Song Dong at the Beijing Commune

Translated by Philip Tinari

Song Dong, Breathing, color photo, 1996. 120 x 180 centimeters, (x2), Ed.12.

In this work, Song Dong attempted to play the master teacher through contemporary art by metaphorically presenting the work as a kind of interactive space for people who require both education and entertainment. In this way, he attracts the viewer’s attention and participation. Do You Want to Play with Me?, within the context of the particular cultural ambiance of China at that time, had a cultural subversive-ness about it. Within half an hour of its opening, the exhibition in which the work was featured was shut down by the police. In terms of its metaphorical tendencies, the work reflected precisely the urgency felt by the entire country just then. There was an increasing understanding of and participation in globalization.

In the “Supermarket” exhibition held in Shanghai in 1999, Song Dong very consciously portrayed himself as a salesperson for the “Song Dong Art Travel Agency,” with the goal of “providing sales advice at the exhibition venue and helping to sell the art products on display in the ‘Art Supermarket.’” The classroom, in this case, had already mutated into the venue, the “students” were now “artists,” and their “master teacher” had become a “spokesman.” This sort of identity manipulation on the part of Song Dong hinted at the burgeoning maturity of Chinese contemporary art. The transition of contemporary Chinese art from active participation (Do You Want to Play with Me?) to its attempt to “explain” such self-creations happened in a few short years. During this time, Song Dong produced the works Cultural Noodles, Back Slapping, Secret-divulging, Water Diary, Breathing and Printing on Water.

Beginning with Cultural Noodles, the artist grew extremely sensitive to culturally based forms of contemporary art. He used a noodle-making machine to cut books into noodle shapes. Spiritual nourishment (books) and material nourishment (noodles) were here skillfully brought together in this way. Yet, the thing most worth noting here is that the so-called spiritual thing (book) was being transformed into a material thing (noodles). Or, rather, the spiritual substance was looking for and building a material foundation for itself. Comparing this work with Huang Yong Ping’s 1987 work A History of Chinese Painting and A Concise History of Modern Painting Washed in a Washing Machine for Two Minutes is still very meaningful. In his book-washing work, Huang Yong Ping took a copy of a translated history of Western painting, then quite popular in China, and a domestic history of Chinese painting, and put them in to mix together inside of a washing machine. In the end, the pulp resulting from this process was exhibited. Here, West and East were de-civilized and irrevocably mixed together. This work was extremely spiritual from the beginning, but yet the artist tried to use a purely spiritual method to reach an un-spiritual goal.

Seven years later, books mixed together took on the form of noodles as the spiritual moved toward a kind of cultural actuality. In Song Dong’s following work, Back Slapping, the specificity of culture was clearly exhibited. Interestingly, this cultural specificity was surprisingly and exasperatingly enlarged and exaggerated in the years after 1989, as Chinese contemporary artists moved abroad to live and work. In the works of Huang Yong Ping, Xu Bing, Cai Guo-qiang and Wenda Gu we can clearly see this. But in China, the shocks that were perhaps produced in cultural form, put through the ringer of a semi-underground situation, turned into expressions of individual will by the artists. Room of Calligraphy Model Books could only be realized in the basement of a private apartment house, and even though it required a great deal of space, it had only 12 square meters, let alone space for viewers. Room of Calligraphy Model Books became a solitary, individualized form of expression. At that time it could only maintain an indistinct connection with the entire contemporary art movement in a manner of continuous accumulation. Because of this kind of indistinct connection, random individual behavior became a natural and necessary method and characteristic of Chinese contemporary art. Song Dong’s Secret-divulging and Heavenly Secret were realized in the hutongs outside the artist’s door and in a nearby park. In Secret-divulging, pieces of ice were wrapped in silk pouches, then hung from hutong walls. As time went on, the ice melted, and the water leaked out of the pockets until they shriveled up. Heavenly Secret also used silk pockets hung from the trees in an outdoor teahouse in a park.

Inside were toy parrots that could mimic the sounds of nearby people. Sound came out of the pockets, as if people’s personal secrets were being let out. As for the environment surrounding the artist, the works were simple, clear, direct, and random. Here, the contests, performances, and struggles of “high” culture yielded to the appreciation, self-contentment, and self-satisfaction of “low” culture. Art History professor Wu Hung convincingly analyzed Song Dong’s art from the perspective of “low” or “unrefined” culture in his article “‘Vernacular’ Postmodern: The Art of Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen.”