He has been involved in many solo and group exhibitions around the world, covering a range of themes and topics including his relationship with his family and their experience of living in modern China (the topic of his widely exhibited installation Waste Not), the transformation of China's urban environment and the impermanence of change.

His father Song Shiping was caught up in the Cultural Revolution and was one of the millions of Chinese people sent to a re-education camp for supposedly being a "counter-revolutionary".

In 1995 he began writing a daily diary on a flat piece of stone using clear water rather than ink, so that the letters would disappear as he wrote them.

He repeated the same thing on a frozen lake in a Beijing park that made no impression on the existing sheet of ice.

[3] Song highlighted China's dramatic transformation through a series of edible installations called Eating the City that were staged between 2003 and 2006 in Barcelona, Beijing, Hong Kong, London, Oxford and Shanghai.

More recently, he created the installation Waste Not displaying over 10,000 household items from the home of his late mother, whose extreme thriftiness led her to obsessively hoard anything that could possibly be re-used.

He has put on many solo shows around the world, including Projects 90, at the Museum of Modern Art in 2009 and A Blot in the Landscape at Pace Beijing in 2010.

His group exhibitions include China Now, Alors Le Chine: Chinese Contemporary Art at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2003; Re-Imagining Asia HKW, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin in 2008, and at The New Art Gallery Walsall in 2009; and The 10th Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool in 2010.

Another artwork Song Dong created is called doing nothing garden, this installation is a 6 meters tall mound piled with organic trash, and is fully covered by grass and flowers.