Waste Not
The artist Song Dong, one of the most inventive figures in contemporary Chinese art, has turned the contents of his mother’s former home in Beijing, which was also his childhood home, into the installation titled “Waste Not.”
When Mr. Song’s father died, in 2002, his mother was inconsolable. She continued to live in the jammed Beijing house, throwing nothing away and obsessively bringing more stuff in it, as if continuing to feather a nest for a now-absent family. His mother came from a wealthy family that lost everything after one of its members was jailed as an anti-Communist spy. His father, trained as an engineer, spent seven years in a forced labor after being accused of counter-revolutionary activity.
Mr. Song proposed that they turn the accumulated junk into an art project. In this way, he argued, nothing would be discarded and lost; everything would be meaningfully recycled and preserved. His mother agreed to this and they emptied the premises.