SONG Dong (??) (Born 1966)

Song Dong graduated from Fine Arts Department, National Normal University of China in 1989, and taught in a high school in Beijing until 2000, when he resigned and became a full time artist. Song Dong has been a significant figure in the development of Chinese conceptual art since the early 1990s. His practice incorporates performance, photography, projection, video and installation.

Emerging from a strong Beijing-based avant-garde performance art community, Song Dong explores notions of perception and the ephemeral nature of existence. His political and financial circumstances have encouraged a solitary, meditative way of working in which ideas are expressed through inexpensive materials and small-scale works. In his photographic series and short video pieces, Song Dong uses sequenced images to explore a rapidly modernizing China and to capture notions of transience and illusion in contemporary society. In his recent works, he focuses on the migrant workers in China – a group vital for the rapid industrialization but commonly viewed as a growing social problem. Using factories and agricultural products expo as exhibition media, and by enabling the audience to directly interact with the participating migrant workers, Song Dong tries to invoke the audience to see the complexity of this social group through a new perspective.

Credit:

http://www.visualarts.qld.gov.au/content/apt2002_standard.asp?name=APT_Artists_Song_Dong