The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

SONG DONG Top: Writing the time with water 1995 Performance, Beijing, China Courtesy: The artist Below: Writing the time with water 2000 Performance, London, UK Courtesy:The artist In an hour-long performance that took place in the Lhasa River, Tibet, in 1996, Song Dong systematically stamped the 'sacred' water with an archaic wooden seal carved with the character for water. As Norman Bryson has pointed out, the seal left no trace and consequently its power as an ideograph was instantly dispersed. The authority of the art work resides instead in Song Dong's 'central gesture', a heroic and futile reiteration that recalls those innumerable small acts through which an individual attempts to construct and regulate a relationship with the world.• Thirty-six serial photographs record Song Dong's performance in Tibet.The artist views the photographs as objects without 'space, sound, touching, taste, time, temperature, experience and emotion', but he also believes that they do 'very little damage to the original idea'. Although Writing diary with water has had an extended life as a performance, a small series of just four photographs is the only tangible remnant. The creation of what one critic has termed 'unsaleable and unexhibitable' 5 works and the lack of evidence relating to the performances, has been queried by viewers uncertain of the meaning of such intense, disciplined and time-consuming interventions. The wooden stamp used by the artist in Stamping the water performance Photograph: Rhana Devenport Song Dong's determination to limit the documentation reinforces the 'private and personal' nature of his practice and the context in which it has evolved. He is a middle-school art teacher, who lives in a small, single-room apartment with his wife Yin Xiuzhen, herself also an artist. Like other Chinese artists of his generation, he has been forced by political and financial circumstances to employ inexpensive materials, to produce small-scale work that can easily be reconfigured or displayed, and to cultivate a solitary, meditative way of working in which signification is achieved primarily through the idea itself. 6 Apart from photographs and videos, the works exist purely in time, and in the imagination. It is through sharing in the 'imagining' of the artist's experience that it becomes possible for the viewer to contemplate the poetry and significance of Song Dong's work. Julie Walsh is Access and Youth Programs Officer at the Queensland Art Gallery. The author thanks Lynne Seear for her assistance with this essay and Suhanya Raffel and Rhana Devenport for making notes available from an interview with Song Dong in Beijing, 8 September 2001. 99