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''Waste Not'' () is an exhibit by Chinese artist Song Dong that displays over 10,000 domestic objects formerly owned by his late mother, who refused to throw anything away if she could possibly reuse it. She had suffered poverty during China's turmoils 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. After the death of her husband in 2002, her desire to hoard items became an obsession that began to have an impact on her standard of living. 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. First exhibited in Beijing in 2005, ''Waste Not'' has since travelled around the world to major galleries in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, where it has been well received by critics. ==Background== Song Dong is a Chinese artist who is often described as a practitioner of conceptual art, focusing on ideas as much as physical materials. He was born in 1966 during the Cultural Revolution and lived through the turmoil that accompanied the development of modern China. He worked as a painter until the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, following which he switched to performance, video and photography after a hiatus of several years. 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. His maternal grandfather was an officer in the Kuomintang (KMT), the nationalist party that ruled much of China from 1928 until its retreat to Taiwan in 1949 after being defeated by the Communist Party of China during the Chinese Civil War. He served with the KMT in the Second Sino-Japanese War. In 1950, his grandparents and his mother moved to Beijing but in 1953 his grandfather was arrested and imprisoned for several years on charges of being a spy for the KMT. His grandmother died of cancer in 1961, having brought up the family in his grandfather's absence. 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.〔"Waste Not". Explanatory notice by Song Dong, exhibited at the Barbican Centre, London. 30 April 2012〕 His father, Song Shiping, was sent to a re-education camp for several years during the Cultural Revolution and did not return to Zhao or the younger Song until 1978.〔 Like many other Chinese at the time, Zhao adopted the habits of frugality and thrift in order to make the best of what little she had. Song recalls that when he was a child, "my mother always brought scraps of fabric to make clothes, because they didn't need to be purchased with the government-distributed clothing coupons." She continued to collect them even in better times because she feared that the shortages might some day return, seeing the habit of "waste not" as a ''fabao'' – literally a "magic weapon" to guard against a return to poverty.〔 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 Dong and his sister Song Hui attempted to tidy up for her but this led to conflict, as Zhao opposed their efforts to dispose of things that she saw as potentially useful.〔 Song eventually came to understand that, as he puts it, He found a way to improve the quality of Zhao's life and still respect her wishes by using the principle of "waste not" and making art out of his mother's possessions. In 2005 he created an exhibit of the objects that she had collected, to her delight; she told him, "Keeping those things was useful, wasn't it!" In putting her things on public display, "it gave my mother a space to put her memories and history in order," where she was acting as the artist and Song was just her assistant. 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".〔 Zhao herself died in 2008 after she tried to rescue a wounded bird from a tree but fell from a step-ladder during the attempt.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Waste Not」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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