Humble Hutong: Where High Art and Low Living Collide

“No matter how rich we are in the future, we’ll always have the blood of the poor.” These words, often repeated to artist Song Dong by his mother, echo off the structures in Song’s latest exhibit. “Wisdom of the Poor” is a recreation of the old neighborhood in which the artist grew up and an homage to the hutong dwellers who have spent a lifetime negotiating the little space they have in order to live a comfortable and dignified life.

It’s also an homage to his mother, who’s since passed away. Since 2005, when he began work on “Wisdom,” Song has never found the right timing or space to display it in its entirety. “On May 6, I wrote a letter to my mom for Mother’s Day, and told her I was still unsure whether our exhibit honoring the wisdom of the poor would be shown.” Days later, he found himself working out the details for this current exhibit.

Song Dong has come a long way from his modest childhood, but his successes have reached a fever pitch this summer. He showed at the Venice Biennale in June before mounting the highly anticipated third segment of “Chopsticks,” a joint exhibition with his wife, artist Yin Xiuzhen, at Chambers Fine Art.

In Venice, Song constructed a similarly themed maze of doors and pagoda-style house frames to act as a “para-pavilion,” showing off the works of other Biennale artists. In that glitzy global context, the deconstructed hutong floated in its own conceptual realm, a novelty to people around the world who had never actually set foot in one.

By bringing his reflections on hutong life back to Beijing, Song is regrounding the work in its local context. He’s also simultaneously curating two smaller exhibits by his long-time students, Ma Qiusha and Wang Shang, commenting, “What I really enjoy is the three of us being linked ... I think I treasure this as a moment more than the location itself.”

Song’s structures exaggerate the absurdity and chaos that characterized his community’s dwellings. In one, he recreates a bedroom featuring a two-person bed with a leafless tree growing out of the middle, an arresting image that reflects a battle of wills between the bedroom owner and nature. The tree encroaches on this person’s space, and he has no choice but to make do. Yet the placement of the bed also reflects the builder’s own efforts to defy his surroundings.

An oversized pigeon cage perches atop another building, alluding to one way that hutong residents would sidestep building restrictions (i.e. you make a space meant for pigeons, then inhabit it yourself ). In similar fashion, all the works highlight the adeptness and creativity of hutong-dwellers’ – rivaling the feats of professional artists – in making transformations and compromises that would alter the look of entire neighborhoods.

The real power of the exhibit, though, lies in the details. Much of the material came from Song’s own past or was donated by the family’s neighbors. With this in mind, the thin mattress and flowered bedspread of the treed room recreate a threadbare life that many locals and even Chinese emigrants will find intimately familiar. And by baring his own nostalgia for how he once lived, Song Dong invites you to connect with similar memories of your own.

When foreigners think of Beijing’s hutongs, we often fancy ourselves co-defenders of these old neighborhoods, fueled by outrage at the vanishing of a way of life we regard with both romance and ignorance. “Wisdom of the Poor” shows us a different angle. It celebrates the community’s ability to endure and adapt, to make its own fate despite what more powerful forces may throw at them. When Song’s mother said, “We’ll always have the blood of the poor,” she also seemed to say: No matter how this city changes, we’ll always find a way to carve out a space of our own.

“Wisdom of the Poor” shows at UCCA until Sep 8.

Photos courtesy of the organizers.