132 | MAY/JUN 2017 | ISSUE 103SHANGHAI
Rockbund Art MuseumFor nearly three decades, Song Dong’s practice has
explored the relationship between life and art. In
his vast body of work, the artist has drawn from
the fragments of Beijing’s widespread demolition
and urban transformation, and his knowledge
of the vanishing world in which he came of age.
His exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum in
Shanghai, “I Don’t Know the Mandate of Heaven,”
staged the artist’s most extensive solo survey in
mainland China.
Set in the grand halls of the 1932 Art Deco
building that once housed the Royal Asiatic
Society’s North China Branch—a hub for
Sinologists in one of Shanghai’s earliest expat
enclaves—the exhibition presented Song’s playful,
top-to-bottom conquest of the six-story structure;
Sketch: RAS (Interior) (2016–17) demarcates in
black tape the dimensions of the stairwells, giving
visitors the impression that they are physically
traversing an architectural draft. While the
exhibition title referenced a Confucian maxim
that says, “At 50, I knew the mandate of heaven,”
Song’s ironic inversion—having reached the age of
50, and harboring doubt and uncertainty—set the
tone for a whimsical visual overload. The quasi-
retrospective felt like a jubilant celebration of a
midlife crisis.
Entering the museum, the viewer was stared
down by a life-sized officer bearing Song’s face
from the Policemen installation (2000–04).
Surrounded by dozens of colorful window
frames and mirrors that make up the immersive
installation Mirror Hall (2016–17), Song’s nod to
Duchamp in The Use of Uselessness: Bottle Rack
Big Brother (2016) is composed of illuminated,
discarded liquor bottles, and positioned in the
foyer like a fallen chandelier. Comestible ruins
of a partially collapsed cityscape in Eating the
City (2017) were stacked up in heaps around
the museum gift shop, with cookies and wafers
scattered among books and souvenirs, and
saccharine aromas lingering long after the
artist’s opening night performance. These works
resonated with Song’s lengthy engagement
with salvaged readymades and the aesthetics
of impermanence.
Beginning in the 1990s, video became an
expressive tool in Song’s conceptual works that
employed water as an ephemeral medium, as seen
in Frying Water (1992), Chinese Ink (1995) and
Water Diary (1995). The artist made use of video
with a documentarian’s impulse, as a mode of
preservation. Later, he turned the camera onto the
city of Beijing itself in Broken Mirror (1999), which
presents a series of street scenes with crowds of
bystanders gathering around Song, whose lens
faces a mirror—until the viewer’s perspective is
instantly transformed as Song smashes the mirror
with a hammer. While perhaps a bit overdramatic
as a metaphorical device, the mirror and its visual
properties have framed Song’s views of both city
and self throughout his career.
His preoccupation with ways of seeing has
also been transposed into recent paintings
and installations, including No Beginning, No
Ending (2014–17) and the newly commissioned
Back Image (2016–17). In the former, Song paints
horizontally flipped frames from the beginnings
and endings of Chinese and Hollywood films,
rendering each in coarse brushstrokes that turn
branded symbols of the Beijing Film Studio
and 20th Century Fox into wry reproductions.
Back Image enacts Song’s behind-the-screen
encounters with cinema as a child: projected light
is represented as a white nylon cone that extends
across the hall, accompanied by small stools
positioned behind a blank screen.
While many Chinese artists of Song’s
generation tend to be figures who collectively
embody a national allegory, Song’s work
ultimately shifts the viewer’s focus from China
writ-large to a personal contemplation of material
traces in his city of origin. In the exhibition’s
eponymous work, At Fifty, I Don’t Know the
Mandate of Heaven (2016–17), 50 doll-faced
puppets were posed idly in the act of daily rituals:
reading blank books, standing with shopping carts
or lying face-down to reenact Song’s performance
Breathing, Tiananmen Square (1996). In an
exhibition that was unabashedly maximalist on
nearly all fronts, the haunting puppets lingered in
focus long after the array of other works blurred
into oblivion.
BENNY SHAFFERSONG DONG
I DON’T KNOW THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN