Video: "Do not throw it away!", Or The story of a thrifty housewife
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
In order to organize a large-scale installation, it is not at all necessary to spend months and years creating works of art. Sometimes it is enough just to take a critical look at your own home, and then systematize and sort the trash that has accumulated over the years. Anyway, this is exactly what the Chinese author Song Dong (Song Dong) did, preparing for his first museum exhibition in the United States. The result is an amazing installation called Waste Not.
The entire exhibition, held at the New York Museum of Modern Art, covered an area of 279 square meters and consisted of 15 thousand items belonging to a single person. True, this man is not Song Dong himself, but his mother. Zhao Xiang-yuan was born in 1938 and died in January 2009. For about sixty years, she lived with her husband and two sons in a small house filled with absolutely unnecessary things: clothes, dishes, toys, bags, bottles were initially used for their intended purpose, and then stored for many years. All this stuff - down to the old buttons and ballpoint pens - after the death of the hostess turned into exhibits of an unusual exhibition.
Song Dong is one of the most inventive representatives of contemporary art in China. The author is often referred to as a conceptualist, implying that in his works he focuses on the idea, and not on the materials. Song Dong's mother was born into a wealthy family, but lost everything when one of her members was accused of anti-communist espionage. Throughout her life, a woman, together with her husband, literally fought for survival, so frugality sometimes reached the point of absurdity - even toothpaste tubes and empty plastic bottles were not thrown away.
The title of the installation is a translation of the Chinese phrase “wu jin qi yong” (“do not throw away”), which contains the whole essence of the half-century struggle for survival. All items are laid out around the frame of a wooden house - the one in which the Song Dong family lived for many years.
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