Song Dong, the artist who writes in water and keeps everything

Song Dong

Photo: Crossmr / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	1966 Beijing
Occupation	Artist
Awards	Grand Award, Gwangju Biennale · UNESCO-Aschberg Bursary for Artists · Artist of the Year (Video and Installation), Award of Art China

For three decades Song Dong has kept a diary that no one can read. He dips a brush in clear water, writes on a block of stone, and the characters evaporate almost as soon as they are formed. The same artist is best known for the opposite gesture, a work that keeps everything. Waste Not lays out more than ten thousand objects his mother refused to throw away, from bottle caps and toothpaste tubes to the wooden frame of her house, in patient rows across museum floors. Between the vanishing diary and the mother’s hoard runs the question his work keeps asking: what a life leaves behind, and who gets to decide it was worth keeping.

He was born in Beijing on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, into a family that history had already knocked down. His mother, Zhao Xiangyuan, came from a once-prosperous household; her father had been an officer in the Kuomintang. His father, Song Shiping, was branded a counter-revolutionary and sent to a labour camp when the boy was four, and returned only when he was nearly a teenager. Ink and paper cost money the family did not have, so his father taught him to practise calligraphy with water on stone.

Song, born in 1966, trained as a painter in the fine arts department of Capital Normal University and graduated in 1989, the year the army cleared Tiananmen Square. Within a few years he had given painting up. After a solo exhibition of oil paintings in Beijing in 1992, he and his wife, the artist Yin Xiuzhen, turned their backs on their academic training and moved into performance, video and photography at a time when almost nobody in China collected such work. He belongs to the first generation of the country’s conceptual artists.

The early pieces are small acts against forces that do not notice them. In Breathing, on a freezing night in 1996, he lay face down on Tiananmen Square for about forty minutes until his breath left a thin film of ice on the paving; he repeated the action on the frozen Houhai lake, where his breath changed nothing at all. The same year, in Stamping the Water, he struck the Lhasa River again and again with a wooden seal carved with the character for water. Writing Diary with Water, the stone diary, had begun in 1995. Touching My Father, first made in 1997, projected the image of Song’s hand moving slowly across his father’s body, recording a breakthrough with a man who had been absent until 1978. The series ran until 2011, long after his father’s sudden death in 2002.

That death is where Waste Not begins. His mother’s thrift, learned through the famines and campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, hardened into hoarding that filled every corner of her small Beijing home. Song’s answer was to turn the hoard into a work and make her its co-author. First shown at Beijing Tokyo Art Projects in 2005 and documented by the art historian Wu Hung, the installation sorts her possessions by kind: basins, blankets, pens, toys, and the bars of soap she gave him as a wedding present. Its title is the phrase she lived by, wu jin qi yong. After her death, his sister Song Hui and Yin Xiuzhen took her place in the crew that rebuilds it. The work travelled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Projects 90: Song Dong opened in June 2009 as its first American showing, then to the Barbican in London, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. Song had already won the Grand Award at the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea in 2006.

Beijing itself became his other subject. As the old hutong neighbourhoods were demolished for towers, he and Yin salvaged their windows, doors and frames and rebuilt them as screens and walk-in structures that make visitors peer into other people’s homes. Eating the City, staged between 2003 and 2006 in cities including Barcelona, Hong Kong, London and Shanghai, built skylines out of biscuits and sweets and invited the public to eat them until nothing stood. At dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel in 2012, Doing Nothing Garden piled organic waste into a mound and let grass and flowers grow over it, a Taoist joke about how much can be made by refusing to act.

Waste Not has never settled on one meaning,. Reviewing it in The New York Times, Holland Cotter felt the work sent “mixed signals” and concluded that it was “every bit as much about loss as it is about muchness.” Some British critics read it as a sermon against throwaway culture; Song has framed it as mourning, a place where his mother could put her memories in order. The sharper question has arrived with success. The artist whose material is the scarcity of a Beijing household now works more and more inside luxury. In January 2026 he took over Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche, the LVMH-owned Paris department store, hanging chandeliers over the escalators and arranging objects that customers had bought there. Song does not pretend the frame is neutral. “Art lovers morph into clients as they go through the exhibition, creating opportunities to change identities,” he said of the show. Whether thrift can remain a critique once it is staged among the merchandise is a question his recent work raises and leaves open.

Borrow Light, commissioned for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo in 2025, filled a mirrored space with lamps reflected on every surface. On 23 October 2026 the Museo d’Arte Orientale in Turin opened Song Dong. Soul Out, his first solo exhibition in Italy, curated by Li Zhenhua and Davide Quadrio and running until 27 June 2027. It brings Waste Not and Eating the City to Italy for the first time and rebuilds Borrow Light from hundreds of lamps lent by Turin residents after an open call.

From 12 November 2026 to 28 February 2027 he joins Geng Xue, Peng Wei and Xiaoze Xie in Chuanqi: Spacetime Dialogues at Rong Zhai, curated by Wu Hung inside Prada’s restored 1918 mansion in Shanghai. Song has the Ballroom, the largest room in the house, where parties once gathered under a stained-glass skylight of sixty-nine panels. He lays a mirror across the floor so the ceiling falls into it and becomes, in the organisers’ words, “a gigantic kaleidoscope,” and surrounds it with furniture from ordinary homes refitted with golden panels. In a house built for a flour magnate’s parties, the son of a woman who saved the ends of her soap is setting out the leftovers of ordinary lives once again, this time under glass.

Tags: art, artists, contemporary art, Prada Rong Zhai, Song Dong, Wu Hung, Yin Xiuzhen

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