TORONTO.- The Art Gallery of Ontario announces that Chinese sculptor and multimedia artist Song Dong is making his Toronto debut with the exhibition Song Dong’s Communal Courtyard. This project features one of Song’s signature works, a large-scale installation made from over 100 doors reclaimed from vintage wardrobes formerly used within traditional courtyard homes in Beijing. This exhibition is curated the AGO’s chief curator Stephanie Smith, and runs from Jan. 30, 2016 to July 17, 2016.
A leader of the Chinese avant-garde, Beijing-based Song (b. 1966) uses art as a means to make sense of China’s social and economic upheavals. This installation, part of Song’s long-running series The Wisdom of the Poor, transforms the AGO’s Signy Eaton Gallery into an immersive experience in which visitors can wander among curving walkways and oval rooms created from over 100 interlocking wardrobe doors. These doors were collected from traditional family homes in Beijing that were often arranged around shared courtyards (dazayuan). This type of domestic architecture, which blurred boundaries between public and private space, has largely disappeared in contemporary Beijing. Despite similar appeareance overall, each door is unique and carries evidence of former owners’ lives through scratches, paint, paper and mirrors. Experienced up close, these interconnected rooms recall an older, more fluid idea of neighbourhood and community.
“This is a particularly exciting time to welcome Song Dong’s Communal Courtyard to Toronto,” says Stephanie Smith, chief curator of the AGO. “Although the piece is very much drawn from Song’s experience in Beijing, it raises questions that apply to all cities, including Toronto, where traditional architecture and ways of living together are changing through rapid growth. This beautiful, thoughtful and moving installation invites us to reconsider how we might hold onto elements of tradition while adapting to the present.”
To extend the conversation beyond the Gallery’s walls, the AGO launched an innovative community residency program. The AGO invited its community partners, artists and local organizations to apply for one of five interactive residencies. The program, which presents projects that engage and respond to Song’s work, launched in tandem with the exhibition, with each residency running for three weeks.
This initiative extends both the AGO’s commitment to its community and the artist’s core concerns within Communal Courtyard. Song writes, “One unique characteristic of the dazayuan communal courtyards is the way that neighbours, in the process of struggling over the space they must share, come to their own compromises in their relationships with one another…. By establishing ties and building bridges from person to person, and from people to things, plants, animals, nature, society and systems of power, the ‘wisdom of the poor’ allows sharing to become a fundamental community value.”
Communal Courtyard was originally commissioned for the 2011 Venice Biennale. It was recently given to the AGO by the Martin Z. Margulies Foundation, Miami and will remain in the AGO’s permanent collection.
Beijing-based Song Dong (b. 1966, Beijing, China) graduated from the fine arts department of Capital Normal University in Beijing in 1989 and emerged to international attention during the 1990s as a pioneering member of the Chinese avant-garde arts community. His poetic, ethically-driven and at times deeply personal art often explores notions of impermanence and the transience of human endeavor. His art practice, which includes collaborations with his wife and fellow Chinese artist, Yin Xiuzhen, ranges from performance and video to photography and sculpture. Song's work has been the subject of solo shows at international institutions including the Barbican Art Gallery, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Museum of Modern Art. He has exhibited in numerous international group exhibitions and biennales, including the 2006 Gwagnju Biennial, the 2011 Venice Biennale exhibition and dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012. In addition to the Art Gallery of Ontario, his work is held by major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
