Still life

Chinese artist Song Dong's signature installation work Waste Not is on display in New York City's Museum of Modern Art. Photos courtesy of Song Dong

Song Dong's expansive art studio in Beijing's northern Changping district could pass for a small airport: A luggage screening box greets visitors to the industrial-loft compound, and a jetliner fabricated from linen dangles, midair, from the ceiling in an adjacent workroom.

"Every day when I wake up, I'm on my way," says Song in the faux arrival hall that doubles as a living room. He is sitting on one of two stainless steel luggage carousels converted into a sofa. The pieces were designed by Song's wife, Yin Xiuzhen, also an accomplished artist and a frequent collaborator.

Indeed, Song - hailed among China's leading conceptual artists - has already arrived, having landed the first major solo exhibition by a Chinese artist in the 80-year history of New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Amid those trappings of transport, Song concedes that he is more a fan of letting the mind wander than of travel itself.

Inside the building, the couple's 6-year-old daughter, Song Errui, scampers about, frolicking on floor mats and showing her own illustrations to her father.

Fidelity to family provides a font of inspiration in Song's oeuvre, and his signature work, Waste Not, the 279-sq-m exhibition that occupied MoMA's second-floor Marron atrium, was assembled in tandem with his mother, Zhao Xiangyuan. Zhao died in January after falling from a ladder while trying to rescue a wounded bird in a tree.

Over five decades, Zhao lived by the maxim wu jin qi yong, or "waste not", refusing to discard items, be they pots, pans, bedding, spent tubes of toothpaste, empty plastic soda jugs, soap bars, handbags, shirts, socks, flasks and bottle caps. That detritus of daily life, arranged around a central building representing the house, constitutes the artwork.

For many Chinese families who lived in the hardscrabble 1960s and 1970s, wu jin qi yong was a guiding principle which deemed that resources be used fully and nothing be wasted.

"Unlike painting or sculpture, Song's work recreated the historical period in people's memory by presenting the actual stuff," says Wu Hung, curator and art historian at the University of Chicago. "It's hard to think of another way more powerful and intense than this."

A part of Waste Not on display on MoMA's second floor.

Not surprisingly, Waste Not is not only a milestone for contemporary Chinese artists, but is also one of the larger installations to ever go up at the museum, says Barbara London, the installation's co-organizer (with Sarah Suzuki) and associate curator of MoMA's department of media and performance art.

"The gallery space is major," says London. The project was a popular draw during the peak visitor season, she adds. The work will travel to Vancouver and then the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 2011.

"It's not just stuff in a room - one picks up on that," London says. "It's laid out in an orderly way, all the old pots, two beds - one bed happens to have on its top all the unused medicines of his father. In the kitchen area there are very rusty woks, teas, china sets You would see it from the third and fourth floors (of MoMA) and a snippet from the fifth."

The 15,000 objects in Waste Not were assembled with the precision of a taxonomist, says London.

"It's like reading a great novel. You have access to a life. It's very personal, but it's his person There's something so special in the humbleness of the materials and the (massive) scale. It's very straightforward, but it tells a story of a life and a culture. They're all materials that came out of China, but it's a universal theme. The items are worn and dusty, an accumulation of a person's lifetime."

The project took shape after the sudden death of Song's father in 2002.

"My mom sank into a deep depression after my father's death," he says. "She wouldn't talk or watch TV. She just sat there weeping all day long. I was very worried."