Art Sonje Center and Pace Gallery is pleased to present an artist’s talk by Chinese artist Song Dong on 7 Dec, 2017.
For over two decades, Song Dong has been at the forefront of Chinese contemporary art, embracing performance, installation, video,sculpture, painting, and calligraphy, and often combining mediums within a single work. Using modest, quotidian materials, Song confronts notions of impermanence, the reality of living in contemporary China, ideas of waste and consumption,the transformation of China’s urban environment, and the value of selfexpression, even when it leaves no trace.
Simultaneously poetic and political, personal and global, his work often explores larger biographical experiences. With Eastern philosophical wisdom, Song explores of the intricate connection between life and art, bringing them alight to an international spectacle.
Because many of Song’s performances were evanescent and witnessed by almost no one, photography and video became the most important media for their expression. Often personal responses to everyday experiences embedded with absurdity and humor, the works span from 1992 to the present. Song Dong will discuss about the the underlying theme of “borderless” in his recent works of art.

Artist Talk
Song Dong (b. 1966, Beijing, China) has emerged from a strong Chinese avant-garde performing arts community and developed into a significant contemporary art figure in the progression of Chinese conceptual art.
Song Dong graduated from the fine arts department of Capital Normal University in Beijing in 1989. His work, which is often in collaboration with his wife and fellow Chinese artist, Yin Xiuzhen, explores the transience of human endeavor.
Song has been the subject of many solo exhibitions at international museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2015) and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2017). He has been included in various prestigious group shows, including Documenta 13(2012), 54th Venice Biennale (2011) and Gwangju Biennale (1995, 2002, 2006).
Currently, Song Dong is part of the major group exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, USA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA; Tate Mordon, UK; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, China;
and M+ Museum, Hong Kong. Song lives and works in his native Beijing.