Nostalgic for hutong life

July 22, 2011 Filed under Center Stage

By He Jianwei

Old objects are our touchstones.

Whether an old bike, a campstool or an old home, the void they leave in our lives is one filled by nostalgia.

Song Dong remembers his life in the hutong as crowded but harmonious. To preserve the memory, he has decorated his gallery to look like an old courtyard, filling its exhibition halls with objects from the past.

Wisdom of the Poor is as much an exhibition as it is a journey into the past. Its main hall is a house with an attic for doves, and its corridor walls are the final resting places of a rusted bicycle, a line of pickle jars and piles of tiles and wood.

While it is only now being made public, work on the exhibition began in 2005, when Song was collaborating with his mother Zhao Xiangyuan on the installation Waste Not.

The two collected numerous everyday possessions – all old and busted – such as legless dolls, blocks of soap, bottles, pans, plates, tubs, basins, oil flasks and blankets.

Song decided to share his art with his mother when his father died in 2002. The project was a way to help his mother sort out her memories and to rethink consumer culture.

Many Chinese housewives who suffered the lean years of the 1950s and 1960s became industrious and thrifty in managing their households: Song’s mother was among them.

When he began helping his mother tidy up her belongings, Song found that she had stockpiled an unbelievable amount of stuff that she was reluctant to part with. The household items took up every corner in their courtyard, even filling an abandoned air raid shelter.

Song realized that courtyard residents made the best use of their limited space possible, often grabbing public space for private use.

In 2005, he began a new project to see how the poor could achieve more while living with less space. Most built kitchens outside their homes or in an alley. In some houses, the pillars were actually the trunks of growing trees.

The first house his parents lived in was smaller than 6 square meters, and their first bed was made of wooden crates. “When the family got bigger, we tried everything to create more space. That was when the shelter and attic appeared. When you live in a limited space, it forces you to find clever ways to solve the problem,” Song said last Saturday at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.

Song visited many courtyards to collects different stories of how people transformed their homes, streets and communities.

In his project, he showed how to enlarge a bedroom. Previously, the bedroom could only contain a bed that was 1.8 meters long. When the son grew to be 1.9 meters, the father had to make the room 10 centimeters bigger.

It was impossible to just knock out the wall, so the parents first made a sloping wall outside of the existing wall, which narrowed the street by 10 centimeters. Gradually, they built an external wall and demolished the internal one.

“It took one year for them to finish the alterations. The son had to curl up on the bed during that time,” Song said.

After the Tangshan Earthquake of 1976, which killed more than 240,000, many people in Beijing began building shelters in their courtyards.

“After the disaster, it seemed that the neighbors had a silent agreement about the distribution of public space. No one touched the shelters that other families put up. It was only in the 1990s that these spaces started coming down,” he said.

Born in 1966, Song did not realize the wisdom of the poor when he was young. It was only when he got older that he realized how much it had affected his life.

“I always remember my mother telling me we are poor people, and that no matter how wealthy we become, poverty will always run in our veins. Maybe that poverty is what helps me to recover such neglected wisdom,” Song said.

Part of that was the idea of “borrowing rights” – that in exercising personal rights one can rebalance public and private space.

For the most part, urbanization has smashed that balance. When neighborhoods were altered, people’s habits changed. People became wasteful, indifferent to their neighbors and careless about pollution.

To convey the shift, Song made a piece about a black and a white cat. His inspiration was Deng Xiaoping’s saying “No matter whether it’s a black cat or white cat, if it can catch a mouse, it’s a good cat.”

“The two cats brought both prosperity and troubles for us. Pragmatism is what most people believe in. But aside from their own interests, they see nothing precious in life,” he said.

In the past, Song made art for his parents. Today he makes it for his daughter, who he hopes can inherit his “simple wisdom.”

The exhibition was first arranged by Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York in 2008. Because of the global financial crisis, its public debut was pushed back to this year.

By He Jianwei

Old objects are our touchstones.

Whether an old bike, a campstool or an old home, the void they leave in our lives is one filled by nostalgia.

Song Dong remembers his life in the hutong as crowded but harmonious. To preserve the memory, he has decorated his gallery to look like an old courtyard, filling its exhibition halls with objects from the past.

Song Dong/Photos provided by UCCA

To enlarge their living space, many people built attics.

While it is only now being made public, work on the exhibition began in 2005, when Song was collaborating with his mother Zhao Xiangyuan on the installation Waste Not.

The two collected numerous everyday possessions – all old and busted – such as legless dolls, blocks of soap, bottles, pans, plates, tubs, basins, oil flasks and blankets.

Song decided to share his art with his mother when his father died in 2002. The project was a way to help his mother sort out her memories and to rethink consumer culture.

Tags: Beijing Today, Center Stage, song dong, UCCA

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http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/notebook/2009/08/10/090810gonb_GOAT_notebook_scott
by Andrea K. Scott
The Chinese artist Song Dong keeps a daily diary in water on stone. Why write a life when the words will evaporate? It’s a conceptual project with pragmatic roots: growing up during the harsh years of the Cultural Revolution, Song hit on a way to practice calligraphy without squandering paper or ink. “Waste Not,” his labyrinthine life-as-art installation, now in MOMA’s atrium, pays homage to a more earthbound frugality. For forty years, the artist’s mother stockpiled birdcages and bottle caps, jump ropes and toothpaste tubes, mittens and bowls in her small wooden house in Beijing. (A section is on view here, its floor lined with shopping bags, bottles, and cans.) When Song’s father died unexpectedly, in 2002, thrift gave way to hoarding, as if stuff could palliate grief. Song persuaded his mother to help him order the chaos into this ramshackle readymade—a humble monument to deprivation, attachment, evanescence, and loss. Duchamp’s bicycle wheel (visit it on the museum’s fifth floor) would surely approve. ♦

Tags: Art, moma, song dong