As part of his ongoing residency at the Asia Art Archive, Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong was in town recently to give a talk on how art can bring people together. And out of his diverse repertoire - his work crosses mediums and includes major projects at the 54th Venice Biennale and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York - the Beijing native chose to focus on a lesser-known exhibition called 'Dad And Mom, Don't Worry About Us, We Are All Well'.
The artist says this family-themed solo exhibition - which was held at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts last year - is his most important exhibition so far because it was there he got the chance to 'meet' his late parents again: 'I miss them so much. They're not alive anymore. Where can I see them? In art, I think.'
Song 'met his parents in art' as early as 1997, when he started to collaborate with his then-estranged father for the first part of his Touching My Father trilogy. The former oil-painting student at the Capital Normal University has recounted over the years how that work marked a breakthrough in his family life.
That summer, Song, then 30, travelled to Germany for more than a month to stage the show. It was the first time he had been away from home for such a long period. Because of the language barrier, he didn't make friends there. So day and night, he just looked at his own exhibition.
Lonely and homesick, Song reflected on his family relations. He particularly wanted to express his love to his father who, like many Chinese fathers of that generation, appeared authoritative and distant to his son.
'When I was a child, I thought my father was great and tall, capable of doing everything. But when I became a teenager, I thought he knew nothing. He didn't know rock music; when I wore slippers to go to university, and grew long hair and a beard, he didn't like that, either,' Song says with a laugh, recalling the generation gap that separated him from his father, an engineer trained at Tsinghua University.