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.