Notes taken from this book Waste Not, which is written by Wu Hong and it discusses about the art work Waste Not by Songdong and his mother Zhao Xiangyuan.
“From Beijing to Gwangju, from Berlin to New York, countless visitors shed tears, as if they had suddenly seen their long-dead relatives and friends.
“Make the best of what you have” is a philosophy of silently collecting and preserving love, tenaciously confronting the current attitude of replacing and discarding as the basic attitude, and recording the eternal love of the Chinese people for their families and lives.
Zhao Xiangyuan is Song Dong’s mother, and like millions of thrifty women in China, she has saved a great deal of household items: fossilised laundry soap, children’s discarded toys, mountains of bottles and pots and pans. …… “Make the most of what you have” is her life’s creed. The art historian Woo Hung and contemporary artists Art historian Wu Hong and contemporary artist Song Dong, together with Ms Zhao Xiangyuan, have turned her vast collection into a travelling world exhibition.
1.All these 10,000 or so pieces of waste come from one place, they belong to the collection of a specific individual and are also cherished by that individual. Thus, really before being transformed into art material and entering the gallery, these objects have already created a link between the five items and have already taken on a different character and meaning from that of the grocery stall. (The objects have a strong sense of certainty and personal connection)
2. The sight of these objects brings to mind a friend or relative who has passed away. Preserving traces of everyday life and experiences that are not collected in orthodox galleries or museums.
3. Created in an increasingly commercialied and globalized world, when rapid replacement and discarding has become the basic attitude to objects in our time.
4. Has the relationship between mother and son – their relationship with other members of the family – changed in the realization of this artistic project? How does this exhibition reconcile the private family with public society?
5 Not transform objects but transport the past to present.
6. rituals This normative social behaviour. A way of understanding the best use of things: see it as an artistic and ritual act with two meanings at the same time, one to preserve historical memory and the other to reinforce social relations. (Ritual acts: people, artefacts and programmed actions
7. There is no fixed form or style for this work; the exhibition format always changes according to the variation of the space. It is necessary to consider the connotations and components of this artistic project – its aims, its participants and the procedures for its realisation – as well as the two contexts of the project: 1) its connection with Song Dong’s other artistic experiments and 2) its position in contemporary Chinese art, in relation to a major art phenomenon that began in the mid-1990s: ‘a domestic turn’, through which the artist took a ‘domestic turn’. turn’, through which the artist deliberately explored and established the intrinsic links between contemporary art and Chinese society and history.
8. the commonality of the objects in the objects to the fullest: 1. the ownership of the objects – they all belong to Zhao Xiangyuan, 2. the nature of the material assemblage and the process of its formation – purely personal, non-commercial motives. 3. the objects are kept for the same precise and identifiable reasons (poverty and fear of the future, fear of material scarcity).
materiality (the fact that the issue or time in question is decisive), in legal terms an evidence is called material because it proves to be relevant to the consequences of a fact, especially when the issue at stake is one of liability and ownership)
The discovery of a real and clear individual in the midst of a mass of material.
9.In the early 1960s, as the country was recovering from the Great Leap Forward and natural disasters, there was a severe shortage of goods and rationing of household items, and life was difficult, even water needed to be reused. Soap had to be dried and stored away after each use.
10. Xiang Yuan practically buried herself in the old things she had accumulated.
11. Things to Use – conceptualised as an autobiographical narrative: shown and told from the first point of view. Each object has an actual past and an imagined future, intimate memories and stories.
12. ‘Healing’ – moving on from the death of the father – becomes a bridge and a catalyst for building a ‘memory relationship’ between mother and child
13. When the quality of life is improved by not throwing things away (refusing to discard things that are temporarily useless but may be useful in the future) This habit allows our living space to be occupied by these materials waiting to be ‘used to their full potential’, and the panic of material scarcity becomes for us the anxiety of useless materials piling up. Their actions increasingly lose their practical justification and take on an artistic logic of ‘collecting for the sake of collecting’, not so much in terms of the needs of the future, but rather in terms of protecting a cherished experience of the past.
But this was not my mother’s philosophy of life alone; it was the collective consciousness of her time. The different conceptions of life of different generations lead to vicarious shopping, because again we have a very different understanding of the good life.
14. It is difficult for today’s young people to understand the sweet and sour aspects of this ‘collection’: can so many worthless bits and pieces really constitute a cocoon of a private world, providing illusory security and warmth and even triggering a hint of intimate memories?
Visitors’ comments ‘Home becomes a large warehouse full of junk and scrap, losing its ‘strategic reserves’, mother becomes vulnerable, feeling that she cannot withstand the risks of life’.
15. Making the Most of Things is the first attempt to represent and reflect on this attitude to life and historical experience.
16. This exhibition uses contemporary art to facilitate three transformations: 1) objects – collected tangible objects become art materials, transferred from private space to public space; 2) people – it is not only Zhao Xiangyuan’s collections that make up this exhibition, but also her own. In doing so, she rediscovers and reorganises her material world and presents it to the public, acquiring the identity of a public artist. 3- The human relationship, in which the son and mother collaborate to reinforce the deep family ethical traditions of Chinese culture in the name of art.
17. Any transformation must be completed in time, unlike a conventional art exhibition with a clear opening and closing deadline. The exhibition begins with the removal of the objects, the organisation of the objects and the development of a new relationship with these objects, and the withdrawal of the exhibition is also an integral part of the exhibition, as the transformation of objects and people continues after the withdrawal.
18. What is the social and ontological significance of art materials and artists?
19. In her lifetime she produced one work, which was entered in an international biennial and won a prize. But the time she took to produce this work: a lifetime.
20. Many of Song Dong’s works revolve around family relationships, using family members as artistic themes.
21. Contemporary Chinese art (modern/avant-garde/experimental art) developed through three basic stages; 1976-1984 Contemporary art developed as a fine art phenomenon at the end of the Cultural Revolution. 1985-1989: 85 New Wave of Art avant-garde art movement – Conclusion 1989 Great Exhibition of Chinese Modern Art. Early 1990: Contemporary Chinese art is rapidly globalised and commercialised.
22. Commercialisation introduced Chinese art abroad, but took many of the original avant-garde artists away from real social and artistic issues, blurring the boundaries between them and commercial artists.
The fate of Political Pop and Cynical Realism can thus be seen as a historical irony: hoping to critically reflect on the proliferation of consumerism, they were automatically consumed.
23. The rapid changes in Chinese society, including the disappearance of traditional cities and neighbourhoods, changes in human relations, and new lifestyles, interests and values
24. Contemporary Chinese artists want to use conceptual art to discuss the stability of history and memory, the conflict between cultural myths and individual existence, and the meaning of fragmentation and disappearance.
25. Touching Father can be seen as one such serious endeavour. As described above, its aim is to reintegrate families that were divided, alienated and alienated by the ‘Cultural Revolution’.