Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well is an exhibition of work by Song Dong spanning the last 30 years
Emerging as an important artist during a period of significant cultural, social and economic transformation in China, Song Dong’s work reinforces the family unit as a microcosm for society at large.
Song Dong creates spaces in contemporary art where members of his family from the present and the past are able to reunite and establish connections. Family members are featured in the artist’s earlier experimental video, photographic, sculptural and neon works which present compelling portraits of parent and child relationships and the power of simple actions in the process of memorialising and remembering. Song Dong’s experimentation with video over the past three decades – superimposing images of himself, his father, his mother and his daughter – bears the hallmark of emotional and spiritual connections but with the impossibility of physical contact ever materialising. Since his parent’s passing, Song Dong created his neon work, Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well (2011)which faces the direction of the sky and relays a personal message from his family to his late father, Song Shiping and late mother, Zhao Xiangyuan.
Coinciding with Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry about Us, We are All Well is Waste Not presented at Carriageworks, Song Dong’s most celebrated work previously exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2009 and London’s Barbican Art Gallery in 2012.
Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry about Us, We are All Well and Waste Not are presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Carriageworks in association with Sydney Festival.
FURTHER INFORMATION AND RESOURCES
Download the roomsheet from this exhibition
Download the artist’s wall texts from this exhibition
VIDEO INTERVIEWS
Song Dong and curators, Aaron Seeto and Lisa Havilah were recently interviewed about the exhibitions, Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well presented at 4A and Waste Not presented at Carriageworks. With thanks to Das Platforms.
MEDIA COVERAGE
Watch this clip from ABC News, 21 December 2012
Sydney Morning Herald, 31 December 2012
John McDonald, Spectrum, The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 February 2013
Daily Telegraph, 7 January 2013
Watch this clip SBS News, 7 January 2013
Artforum Critics Pick
RealtimeFebruary/March 2013
Time Out Sydney, 8 January 2013
Concrete Playground
The Art Life, 18 January 2013
Artswriter by Elizabeth Fortescue, 29 December 2012
Habitus Living, 3 January 2013
Innerwest Courier, 9 January 2013
Books and Arts Daily, Radio National, 4 February 2013
Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well
Song Dong
5 January – 30 March 2013
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay St, Sydney NSW
Contact: 02 9212 0380
11am – 6pm Tuesday – Saturday
Waste Not
Song Dong
5 January – 17 March 2013
Carriageworks
245 Wilson St, Eveleigh NSW
Contact: 02 8571 9099
10am – 6pm daily
Free
Presented by
