Song Dong’s Soul Out reveals three decades of intimate dissent
The Chinese artist's first solo exhibition in Italy brings together iconic installations and archival performances spanning from the 1990s to today, tracing a practice rooted in personal memory and collective history.
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Song Dong’s practice has always moved in two directions at once: inward, towards the intimate vernacular of home and memory, and outward, towards the systems and histories that shape collective life. His first solo exhibition in Italy, at the Museo d’Arte Orientale in Turin, brings this essential tension into sharp focus through a carefully assembled sequence of installations, photographs and performance documents spanning more than three decades.
The exhibition opens with “Waste Not”, an overwhelming immersion in domestic accumulation. Thousands of objects hang from floor to ceiling: clothing in amber and faded rose, shoes arranged by colour and wear, vessels and vessels and vessels again, each one a fragment of domestic life suspended in perpetuity. The installation transforms the gallery into a kind of archive of the everyday, a space where personal history becomes monumental through sheer accumulation and the artist’s refusal to discard.
Elsewhere, neon text in Chinese characters glows in deep red against architectural frameworks, rendering language as both personal and political utterance. These works, executed across decades, carry the weight of individual doubt and collective uncertainty, speaking to how intimacy and ideology have remained inseparable in contemporary China.
The exhibition balances these dense, visionary installations with archival material: photographs and videos documenting performances from the 1990s onwards. These records offer glimpses into Song Dong’s evolving methodology, revealing how his work has consistently used the body, objects and language as instruments for exploring memory’s relationship to history. The archive itself becomes part of the work, collapsing the distance between past gesture and present encounter.
What emerges across the exhibition is a portrait of an artist committed to a singular vision: that the private sphere contains within it the shape of the collective, that to excavate one’s own experience is to unearth the contours of a much larger world.
Song Dong: Soul Out runs through June 27, 2027 at the Museo d’Arte Orientale in Turin.
Imagery courtesy of Pace Gallery (@pacegallery).
