Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well is an exhibition of work by Song Dong spanning the last 30 years. Emerging as an important artist during a period of significant cultural, social and economic transformation in China, Song Dong’s work reinforces the family unit as a microcosm for society at large.

Song Dong creates spaces in contemporary art where members of his family from the present and the past are able to reunite and establish connections. Family members are featured in the artist’s earlier experimental video, photographic, sculptural and neon works which present compelling portraits of parent and child relationships and the power of simple actions in the process of memorialising and remembering. Song Dong’s experimentation with video over the past three decades – superimposing images of himself, his father, his mother and his daughter – bears the hallmark of emotional and spiritual connections but with the impossibility of physical contact ever materialising. Since his parent’s passing, Song Dong created his neon work, Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well (2011) which faces the direction of the sky and relays a personal message from his family to his late father, Song Shiping and late mother, Zhao Xiangyuan. Coinciding with Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We are All Well is Waste Not presented at Carriageworks, Song Dong’s most celebrated work previously exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2009 and London’s Barbican Art Gallery in 2012.

Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry about Us, We are All Well and Waste Not are presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Carriageworks in association with Sydney Festival

Image: © Song Dong, Waste Not (detail) 2005/2009/2012, Installation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2011. Photography: Jane Hobson. Courtesy of the artist and Tokyo Gallery + BTAP Beijing.