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An interview with Song Dong
Still from Smart Museum interview with Song Dong, 2019.

Song Dong 宋冬

Chinese, born 1966

Artist Profile

Since the early 1990s, Song Dong has repeatedly used water as a signature material in his practice, which combines performance, video, and conceptual art. Song’s artistic experiments with water’s naturally occurring transitions between solid, liquid, and vapor imbue this seemingly neutral and elemental material with deep metaphysical significance. For Song, the transparent, formless, and ephemeral qualities of water provide opportunities for artistic reflections on presence, absence, action, trace, and impermanence.

Water Records draws from the artist’s earliest and ongoing performance work, Writing Diary with Water (1995), in which Song kept a daily record of his activities written in water on a dark grey stone. In both works, brushstrokes of written characters and figures begin to evaporate and disappear before the artist can finish delineating them. According to Song, these ephemeral water drawings were meant to be “random fragments of memory, imprecise, incorrect, incomprehensive and incomplete.”1 By not rendering any concrete, permanent representation, Song’s performance explores the transience of water, a material that leaves no record behind.

In Traceless Stele, Song again employs the principle of water evaporation by inviting audiences to draw on a blank stele using a brush and water. Used as memorials in China for centuries, stone steles feature carved inscriptions that relayed important information about the people or events they were meant to commemorate. Here, the blank stele invites viewers to write their own messages. Yet, once written, the water quickly dries, erasing the message to create a fleeting memorial that contrasts with ancient steles, whose inscriptions are preserved for centuries. Here, Song employs water’s characteristics of translucency and formlessness to explore what cannot be seen nor said.

Song Dong. Photo courtesy of Pace Gallery.
“The allure of water is its formlessness.”
—Song Dong 2

Footnotes

  • 1

    From notes written by the artist on a sketch of the work.

  • 2

    Interview with Song Dong, June 28, 2019, conducted and translated by Nancy P. Lin.

Works on View

Smart Museum of Art

Traceless Stele, 2016

Metal stele, heating device, water, and Chinese brushes
92 1/2 x 59 1/16 x 39 3/8 in. (235 x 150 x 100 cm)

Collection of the artist, courtesy of Pace Gallery

Song Dong painting in water on his work Traceless Stele, 2016. Photo ©️ Song Dong
Song Dong painting with water on his work Traceless Stele, 2016. Photo ©️ Song Dong.
Smart Museum of Art

Water Records, 2010

Four-channel video projection, running times variable

Collection of the artist, courtesy of Pace Gallery

Song Dong, Water Records, 2010. Detail. Collection of the artist, Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Song Dong, Water Records, 2010. Detail. Photo courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.
Song Dong, Water Records, 2010. Detail. Photo courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.
Song Dong, Water Records, 2010, Four-channel video projection; and Traceless Stele, 2016, Metal stele, water, brushes, and heating device. Collection of the artist, courtesy of Pace Gallery. Installation view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA.
Song Dong, Water Records, 2010, and Traceless Stele, 2016. Installation view, The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2019–20. Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.