My daughter is my four seasons

My daughter is my four seasons

Song Dong’s work, entitled My daughter is my four seasons 2010, builds on research the artist undertook for the project in the historical garden city of Suzhou in China, a city tracing back to the Spring and Autumn Periods (770BC–476 BC). Suzhou is celebrated for its elegant gardens that flourished in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing Dynasties (1644–1911) and follow the aesthetics of Chinese painting traditions.
Song Dong’s work hovers between home and public life, as he articulates an aesthetic and poetic language of contemporary vulnerability. “Art is life, life is art” the artist says.
This work engages with the concept of ‘borrowing’ landscape that itself has been crafted by human hand. The work adopts the mode of a pavilion, a particular aspect of Chinese garden design that offers simultaneous views of four constructed landscapes viewed through four circular windows or scenic openings.
Song Dong created four miniature landscapes within the pavilion with his daughter; each seasonal landscape then translated to video to be viewed through circular apertures. Using the language of garden architecture and design to question human creation and consumption of landscapes, Song Dong reflects upon his relationship with his daughter, particularly her presence as a reminder of his own unremembered childhood and his apprehension about the future, within a wider frame of life cycles and their social formation.