Waste Not

She had suffered poverty during China's turmoil in the 1950s and 1960s and had acquired a habit of thrift and re-use that led her to store domestic objects of all kinds in her tiny house in Beijing.

Song and his sister managed to alleviate it by persuading her to let him use her possessions as an art installation, reflecting her life and the modern history of China as experienced by one family.

[1] Born in 1938, Song Dong's mother Zhao Xiangyuan was a member of a prosperous family that fell on hard times after Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China in 1949.

The repeated natural and man-made disasters suffered by China in the 1950s and 1960s, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, claimed the lives of millions of Chinese and drove Song Dong's family into poverty.

[2] When Song's father died suddenly in 2002 his mother suffered an emotional breakdown and her habit of holding on to things was taken to extremes, with every possible space of her tiny house crammed with thousands of domestic odds and ends.

Song and his mother created a neon sign for the exhibit in 2005 as a message, facing the stars, to his father: "Dad, don't worry, mum and all the family are well".

The exhibit consists of thousands of domestic objects such as toothpaste tubes, bowls, toys, bottle tops, crockery, cutlery, food containers and ballpoint pens, arranged in neat rows or piles.

[1] It takes its name from the Chinese adage wù jìn qí yòng (物尽其用), translated roughly as "waste not, want not" but more literally as "anything that can be somehow of use, should be used as much as possible".

"[8] Jenny Gilbert of The Independent saw it as "a densely detailed portrait of a family's life together", seeing it as "a bid to fill an emotional void left by children grown and gone, a partner deceased."

She noted that the "faded and ferociously ironed-flat baby clothes are freighted with longing – perhaps not only for times past, however hard and meagre, but for an imagined future: phantom grandchildren, the cycle beginning again.

"[6] Michelle Price of the Architects Journal drew a somewhat different lesson, feeling that it highlighted "the level of consumerism and waste in the world" and commenting that it "questions the throw-away culture we live in and promotes a more thrifty lifestyle that would contribute to lowering CO2 emissions worldwide.