Song Dong : An Artist With Serious Thought About Environment

London 30th September 2019.
Today I met Chinese Artist Song Dong at Pace Art Gallery. His installations and other art work will be at display from 1st October at the Gallery.
Each artist has his own thought process which he translates on canvas. Song Dong has seen poverty in his early days, struggled and thereafter overnight transformation of cities into mega cities, he tries to express pain and peril of this change through various art medium. 
Theme of his current exhibition is 'Same Bed Different Dreams'.
Song Dong is from Beijing and on the forefront of contemporary art in Mainland China . Born in the year 1966, he was graduated from Capitol Normal University in Beijing in 1989. In fact Song's artistic career witnessed social as well as political turmoil and transformation in his own country. He witnessed fast pace of development to modernize the Chinese cities, he also witnessed changing life of people living there. He says that his creativity confronted notions of memories, impermanence , waste, consumerism due to this modernization.Another elements are political, global, personal and his work explores the issues of life.
The most interesting installation in his current display is 'City Build To Be Destroyed'. It is a surreal city made of real biscuits, wafers, chocolate, pastries with sky scrappers, stadium, roads and whatever today's  modern cities possess.
Says he,' As cities in Asia grow, old quarters, houses to pave way to sky scrappers, it is happening every day. Few cities have also built from scratch in past twenty years. So my sweet city built of biscuits and candies, is tempting and delicious. I call these candies gorgeous poisons. Being pleasurably tasty but harmful of overeating.We will eat it today itself until it ruin'. So Song Dong has a strong message for today's town planners.
When I asked to elaborate his other medium, he says,' You can see here, it have used photography, projection, video, installation. I try to express my ideas through inexpensive materials and small scale work.' The main installation  in the hall was made of old window doors, used lights and lampshades. His objective of these displays  to explore a rapidly changing China and to capture notions of transience and illusion in society there.

In the past years Song’s investigations of impermanence led him to create few interesting work. In 1995, in his work Water Diary,  Song documented his daily activity of writing in water on stone, only to watch it evaporate. 

Inspired by childhood memories of food scarcity, Song used the cultural significance of food as a means to inspire dialogue and participation in pieces such as Edible Pen Jing (Bonsai) (2000).

In 2005, Song created the installation Waste Not as an act of physical and psychological unpacking. Consisting of over ten thousand items accumulated by his mother over a span of five decades, Waste Not exists as a veritable landscape of commodities. Ranging from bottle caps, shoes, blankets, toothpaste tubes, metal pots, and toys the installation becomes a meditation on consumption and the archive.

He has displayed his work in Gwanju Biennale, Korea, Kiev Biennale, San Francisco apart from in his own country.
UNESCO recognized him in 2000 as Bursary Laurate.