Madeleine Thien on Song Dong’s Installation ‘Waste Not’
‘Even a piece of paper had a trajectory and a life: to be written upon; to be used as a tablecloth or to clean the table; to be burned for heat and to become ashes’
‘Even a piece of paper had a trajectory and a life: to be written upon; to be used as a tablecloth or to clean the table; to be burned for heat and to become ashes’
In 2005, Chinese artist Song Dong created an exhibition with his mother, Zhao Xiangyuan, at Tokyo Gallery in Beijing. The installation, Waste Not, consists of more than 10,000 items which Xiangyuan saved from the time she was a little girl. Those 50 years saw the arrest and imprisonment of, firstly, her father and, later, her husband; the birth of modern China; the loss of tens of millions of lives to political violence; the consecration and abandonment of collective living; and spiralling waves of repression and freedom. ‘Don’t waste anything,’ Xiangyuan told her son. ‘The future will not forgive you.’ She believed that even a piece of paper had a trajectory and a life. To be written upon, folded or turned into toys. To be used as wrapping. As a tablecloth or to clean the table. To be burned for heat and to become ashes.
In Waste Not (from wùjìn qíyòng – ‘waste not’ or ‘let all things serve their proper purpose’), multiples give us the infinitely personal. Scraps of fabric, bars of soap, abandoned toys, hundreds of utensils, magazines, empty toothpaste tubes, bottles, string, even the wooden frame of Xiangyuan’s house. They are all wù, which can be translated as things, substance, creature or creation.
‘My mother’s way of living is art,’ Song wrote, ‘but she doesn’t know it.’ My own father, who passed away in December, had the waste-not ethos, too. A piece of clothing lived multiple lives, surviving in smaller and smaller pieces. People hold onto faith and worldly goods in such endless ways. Xiangyuan curated the show until she passed away in 2009. In those last years of her life, people who had lived through the Cultural Revolution and collected the same things, substances, creations, wù, would come up to her and say: ‘It’s not just your home, it’s my home also.’
