Turin, October 23 (askanews) – Great poetry is "strange," said the canonical critic Harold Bloom. Likewise, the large-scale site-specific project that Chinese artist Song Dong created at the MAO Museum of Oriental Art in Turin, in collaboration with the institution itself, transforming the building into a vast artistic, but above all emotional and human, device capable of generating a multitude of sensations and giving form, through objects, to the sense of time and connections.
Entering the “Soul Out” exhibition is truly like entering a life, which gradually reveals itself to be our own. “This exhibition,” Davide Quadrio, director of the MAO and co-curator of the exhibition, told askanews, “was born out of necessity with respect to the work we do within the museum, and since this year we completely redesigned the China section, it was essential to have someone who understood what we were doing.
So by working on the cultural object, working no longer so much on art, but on how these objects that are inside the museum, which are therefore musealized, are objects that culturally represent a level of human history that is independent and in some way separate from the cultural peculiarity of each of us, it therefore becomes a place no longer of difference but of commonality." There are two installations that have all the characteristics of being unforgettable: the first is the monumental "Waste Not," which passes through many rooms of the museum and brings together 10 everyday objects from Song Dong's family.
A vast warehouse of feelings, memories, and loss that obviously brings to mind accumulation, but the deeper you delve, the more you understand that we're talking about feelings, not just objects. And then there's a large light installation, reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama, which is a true fulcrum of the exhibition. "Her art," Quadrio added, "is an art that deals with the human object, at this point it's become normal. Here, for example, we are inside the installation, in a somewhat more participatory way, that we did with the Accidente di Torino, called 'Borrow Lights,' lending light, and there are 200 lamps that we have collected inside the museum in a work that becomes, yes, the artist's work, but which becomes the light of everyone, through which everyone will pass to enter and visit the museum." Saying "human object" is very important, because if we often witness the reification of people, that is, being considered and treated like things, here the opposite occurs, objects are the measure of human experience, they come to life alongside us, there are witnesses and narrators. As one of Song Dong's most famous quotes, which the artist also repeated in Turin, says, "Art is life and life is art." It seems like a very simple, even banal, phrase, but hearing it after experiencing the exhibition changes everything; you understand its quiet and delicate depth, you feel its value of affection and closeness, to everyone. It could also be a summary of the evolution of the art world over the last 50 years, but that's not so important now. What matters now is letting art touch us and whisper to us, once again, what we don't know about ourselves, as the beautiful and moving video "Touching MY Father" does, suspended in a dimension that is only that of our hearts.
Askanews