Song Dong: 36 Calendars
By Noelle Bodick
Although pop-up reminders and smartphone schedules have replaced hanging wall calendars in the digital age, there was nothing nostalgic or sentimental about those by Chinese artist Song Dong. Covering the capacious, black-columned ArtisTree hall, over 400 wire-bound pages depicted every month of the artist’s life for the past 36 years. While the project traced China’s staggered emergence from the Cultural Revolution, politics never overwhelmed the frank, intimate portrait of life in Beijing.
The pencil illustrations—clean, restrained and rendered with becoming earnestness—portray events torn from the headlines and diaristic memories. For example, a bottle of Coca-Cola available for the first time in December 1979 marks China’s opening up to the West as well as the artist’s first mouthful of the product (it turned out to be a Chinese fake). Across the hall, Song recalls a television screen flashing footage of a single figure staring down a tank (an image from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest, which was not a Western fake, as the Chinese government claimed).
