'For this artist book, the Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong had an untranslatable sentence about the act of doing nothing translated into English by various people, companies, a translation office, and Google Translate. The Chinese characters are identical on each paper, but each translation varies a great deal. The sentence and its interpretations circle around notions of doing something, doing nothing, wasting and not wasting, each containing an individual perspective on the value of human activity. With each letterhead, color, and signature, the connotation of the line shifts, and Song Dong’s own handwritten decryption oscillates between doing nothing and common everyday activities: eating, drinking, defecating, sleeping, studying, forgetting, rehearsing, and understanding. At the end of the list one finds again the advice “Doing Nothing.” Song Dong (*1966) lives and works in Beijing.' - from the dOCUMENTA (13) website

100 Notes - 100 Thoughts is a series of notebooks published as a prelude to the dOCUMENTA (13) exhibition in 2012, comprising facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations, and conversations.
Alternative title

100 Notes - 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen - 100 Gedanken

Access level

Onsite

Location code
MONS.SOD
Language

English

Keyword
Publication/Creation date

2012

No of pages

22

ISBN / ISSN

9783775729338

No of copies

1

Content type

artist book, 

artist monograph

N°084: Song Dong - Doing Nothing
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In Copyright

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This item is covered by one or more copyrights. It is available for research only or use within Hong Kong’s fair dealing rules. Please do not copy, re-use or reproduce this item without the permission of the copyright holder.

N°084: Song Dong - Doing Nothing