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| A Potpourri of Personal Readymades |
An array of wash basins, paint brushes and umbrellas form a rectangle in the first of three rooms of the exhibition, circumscribed by a line of rickety wooden chairs. A heap of used plastic bags wrapped carefully in triangles evoke images of Chinese buns, mantou, and stacks of empty water bottles and milk cartons stand guard underneath the wooden beams of the roof, as if collecting imperceptible rivulets of dripping water. Shattered porcelain is arranged by increasing size alongside ruined bits of Styrofoam. Marx’s The Civil War in France of 1871 complements stacks of pamphlets outlining the thought of Chairman Mao. A trapezoid collection of worn shoes jut out from the east wall of the installation’s second room, anchored by a wooden bed overflowing with carefully folded worn pajamas. One gets the sense of a familial home turned haphazardly into a storage unit, and the thin corridors between a cacophony of objects that Song’s mother must have negotiated every day.
I find myself fixated firstly on the social and political messages behind Song’s work. The title of the exhibition, Waste Not, alludes to an adage in Communist China that went beyond mere exhortations to be frugal – it was a way of life, a necessity for survival. Extensive wall text provides the background to the assemblage of objects: Song’s mother came from a prosperous background, but due to successive rounds of political and social upheaval, fell calamitously into a state of utter destitution. When loss piled upon loss and Song’s father passed away unexpectedly, his mother’s frugality went into overdrive. Any material object with potential use was sequestered away for a rainy day – Waste Not. This mentality has resulted, in Song’s own words, in a “generational gap” between a generation that learned to take nothing for granted and their children, who live today in a consumer society amongst gleaming condominiums that has little use for historic hutong neighborhoods and frugal values. I find myself transfixed by this archaeology of the personal and quotidian, a relic of awesome personal and societal upheaval.
Song ‘s self-described statement on “the ephemeral nature of existence” is, at its core, a meditation on the response of one individual to the helplessness of the human condition. The exhibit pulsates with the felt tension between the urge to utterly surrender to the vicissitudes of life, and the desire to forcefully exert agency over one remaining sphere of influence. Beneath the surface of this motley assemblage of worn objects, one senses the profound fear of emptiness that drove an obsession with material form.
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| An Obsession with the Material Form |
Song’s worn readymades and found objects disrupt conventional understandings of the role of art. The success of his work, the transfiguration of everyday trash into the revelatory, is reflected in the meditative placement and organization of scattered objects: like placed with like, governed by steady increases in size and gradations of colors, ultimately forming triangular patterns and other geometric shapes. All this hints at an inchoate order surfacing beneath chaos, at a beauty and transcendence that have sublimated successive rounds of rending grief and loss.
Is hoarding a compulsive disorder, or can it be regarded “art”? Perhaps it is both. For in our most banal, everyday decisions – what we choose to keep, and crucially, what we choose to let go – we create and express something profound about our identity, our values, and our relationship to being. This too is art, in its most fundamental sense.
