Still life

Song Dong puts items used in his work Waste Not in order in MoMA.

Some of the 15,000 objects in Waste Not.

Just as worrying for Song was that his mother's habit of keeping everything, had gone to the extreme. "She not only refused to throw anything away but also left the things that used to be neatly folded in the wardrobe scattered everywhere in the house," Song says. "My sister (Song Hui, who also assisted with the installation) and I tried to clean up for her but my mother was very unhappy about it."

Song thought that art might be his last hope to pull his mother out of her depression, so he asked her to help him sort and arrange the goods and turn them into an art project. In the process, her spirits soared.

The work, unveiled as part of the Beijing Tokyo Art Projects in Beijing in 2005, has also been assembled in Berlin and Walsall, in the West Midlands of England. It won the Grand Award of the Gwangju Biennale in the Republic of Korea in 2006.

Zhao fulfilled her prophecy that her trove would find ultimate utility. At various showings she held court "in one corner, sitting on an old sofa", chatting with visitors, says Song. "My mother changed into another person. She said if I didn't have this she would have probably died."

A collection of tubes of toothpaste in different brands.

"This is what I call the curative effect of art," says Wu, of the University of Chicago.

After the success of Waste Not, Song suggested selling the work to buy a new apartment for his mother. "She refused right away," he says. "She said she kept the things for her children, not for money." Song says he hopes to eventually build a museum to house the work in its entirety.

And it is a massive collection. A longshoreman's dream, the objects must be crammed into two shipping containers holding 50 boxes ranging from 1.5 to 2.5 sq m.

The exhibition triggered a deep emotional response in some museum goers. "One woman told me it 'gave me a rethinking to change. I saw your work and I want to see my grandmother now'," Song says.

The foundation for Song the artist was built when he was 4. He didn't want to go to kindergarten. Instead, he stayed at home and made some sculptures or drawings.

 

He graduated from the Capital Normal University in 1989 with a major in oil painting. In short order, he morphed into a performance and video artist.

"There was no money, so I did teaching, advertising, work for a film studio, doing backgrounds," says Song. The energy of the 1990s was heady, though, and money was of minor concern. Although the media he used was unconventional, his constant theme of filial duty lent an ironic twist.

The objects for Waste Not have been shipped  to New York in 50 big boxes.

A creative burst led to such works as Stamping the Water (1996), a set of 36 chromogenic photographs. The pictures document his splashing in a river in the Tibetan Plateau with a seal containing the character for water. Naturally, no trace of the futile act is left, and the work mines the impermanence of man's existence.

Another important work, Touching My Father (1998) in which Song projected a video image of his hand onto the body of his father, sent a strong statement about the traditional relationship between father and son in China.

Song is now working on an installation project called The Wisdom of Poor People. He is collecting ideas from the less fortunate, such as building a house around a tree to make the tree their own.

"I tend to pay attention to things that are overlooked by other artists," Song says. "I think that's what made me different from other Chinese contemporary artists."

London agrees. "Throughout the bubble (of the China art craze among Western collectors), he was always someone who remained authentic," she says.

She puts Song among a vanguard that includes Pei Li, video artist Wu Wenguang, multimedia maven Wang Gongxin and installation artist Xu Bing.

Song refuses to ride the vicissitudes of ascetic, sometimes dehumanizing, conceptual art. Instead, he ponders the positive, with a heartfelt and poignant examination of the family.

"I don't want people to be sad," he says. "I want to give a new value for the world."