Pace Live: The Films of Song Dong

Since the 1990s, Beijing-based artist Song Dong has been experimenting with performance-based works and multimedia installations that address notions of memory, impermanence, waste, consumerism, and the urban environment in Chinese culture. His performances and videos explore the duality of the poetic and the political, the personal and the global, to question the nature of reality in the face of China’s rapid modernization.

On the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at Pace’s gallery in London this fall, Pace Live will present a week-long screening of video works and films that document his ongoing performance practice from the 1990s to the present. Among the works featured in the presentation are Broken Mirror (2005)—a film comprised of opposing images that together expose the struggle of Beijing culture to maintain its traditions despite the inevitable forces of urbanization—and Touching My Father (1998), a video in which Song projects an image of his own hand onto his father’s body, alluding to traditional relationships between fathers and sons and offering a metaphorical bridge across the generation gaps that have marked China’s recent development.

Image: Song Dong, Broken Mirror, 1999, single channel video DVD and original DV tape, total running time: 3 minutes, 54 seconds.

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