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Hungering for art? A show you can eat up
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IN the first chapter of “Alice in Wonderland,” the title character comes across a cake with “eat me” written in raisins on top. So she does and the adventure begins.
Artist Song Dong, 50, might hang a similar sign on his current exhibition at Fuxing Royale in Shanghai. When he talks about “interactive” art, he means that literally. His works are edible, and exhibition visitors will be invited to take a bite when the exhibition ends tomorrow.
Song, a Beijing native, is active in sculpture, installations, performances, photography and video. His “Eating the City” exhibition presents an urban landscape made from cookies, waffles, candies and pockies. It’s a metaphor for modern urban transformation.
“Art can take many forms,” he says. “You see with your eyes, smell with your nose and taste with your tongue. I want the public to be fully interactive with my art.”
The love Chinese people have for food inspired Song, who admits that he’s a bit of a gourmet himself. In the 1990s, Song once designed bonsai art made from chocolate, ham, sausages, salmon and Beijing noodles with soybean paste.
Since 2003, he has highlighted China’s dramatic urban transformation through a series of edible installations called “Eating the City.” The exhibitions have been staged in Beijing, Hong Kong, Barcelona, London, Oxford and other cities around the world.
The metropolises Song creates are made of biscuits, cakes, waffles and candies. As soon as they are finished, they are eaten by exhibition visitors.
“I build cities to be destroyed,” he explains. “The city is tempting and delicious. We can use our desire to build a city and, at the same time, we can demolish it with our desire. In the end, the city is eaten up, and the diners become the carriers of the city’s fragments.”
Biscuits and waffles are very much like the construction materials. Their different colors and shapes lend themselves to almost every edifice requirement.
“All of them are as sweet as candies, so I call them ‘beautiful poisons’,” Song says.
He explains that sweet is alluring but not necessarily healthy for the human body when consumed in excess. To some extent, that’s a bit like the cities we live in — positive and negative aspects.
All the cities Song creates look very much alike, whether they are exhibited in China or in the UK.
“There are no landmarks in my cities because, in a sense, all cities are the same with their tall buildings and office towers,” he says. “However, one interesting thing is that visitors in different places think it’s their city. They always find something familiar in it.”
His edible artworks have been exhibited in a variety of venues, from art galleries and museums to public squares and department stores. In Shanghai, the display is being held at a high-end property in the city center.
“The outside of the property is still under construction, and the biscuit city inside is being built too, which sets up a subtle connection between them,” Song says.
Song is fascinated by urban development and has made metropolises a major subject of his artworks.
“As cities in Asia grow, old buildings are knocked down and new ones are built,” he says. “Take my hometown Beijing, for example. Over the years the historic city has been progressively demolished to make way for modern buildings.”
That theme of demolition and revival is echoed in Song’s “Eating the City” installations. Each biscuit city is devoured in the end, just like old cities. New things spring up almost overnight.
“Sometimes I feel sad and puzzled,” the artist says. “I think about how we should live in this new, modern world, while keeping old traditions and cultures.”
Song says he never quite knows what will happen on the last day of an exhibition. Visitors react differently in different cities. In Brazil, for example, passionate exhibition visitors attacked the confectionary city in their zeal to eat it.
“I don’t know how Shanghai audience will react, but I can accept any result,” he says. “This is the real charm of installation art.”
Song’s works always focus on the theme of the impermanence of time. In 1995, he began writing a daily diary on a flat piece of stone, using water rather than ink so that the letters would disappear as he wrote them.
What shot him to public fame was an art performance in Tian’anmen Square in Beijing in 1996. He went to the square on a freezing New Year’s Eve to create a piece he called “Breathing.” He lay face down on the cold stone for 40 minutes, and when he rose, his breath had created a small area of ice on the pavement.
“Eating the City” exhibition
Date: August 28, 1:30-4pm
Venue: Fuxing Royale, 699 Xizang Rd S.
Tel: 3316-1188
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