Song Haidong

Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo
Acquired by the present owner from the above

China, Beijing, National Art Museum of China, China/Avant Garde, 1989
China, Beijing, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, '85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art,5 November, 2007 - 17 February, 2008, p. 217

This work is generally in good condition. There are some glue stains to the wooden base. Please note that this was not examined under ultraviolet light.
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The Earth from Space was the Jiangsu artist Song Haidong's submission to the 1989 exhibition "China's New Art Post-1989" and one of the earliest installation works by a contemporary Chinese artist. After completing a postgraduate programme in the sculpture department of the National Academy of Art in 1985, Song moved to Shanghai and formed the 'M' Art Group with Shanghai artists like Shen Fan, Li Zuming, and Zhou Tiehai. Together they created some of the earliest works of performance art in Shanghai, including Last Supper of 1988. The Earth from Space, which generated considerable controversy in the 1989 exhibition, consists of a globe with a small brick wall tied to it above with a white string and photographs of East Berlin placed next to it. The globe appears cut into several dozen pieces. The brick wall is a miniature version of the Berlin Wall. Aside from photographs of the Berlin Wall, the photo frame contains also an image of the 39h Parallel that divided North and South Korea. The Earth from Space was exhibited with the following caption: "The environment of people's everyday life has become more and more complex. Aliens haven't only hijacked an American fighter jet to understand human technology." When we consider this work in the context of the Soviet Space Program's discovery of a World War I-era American fighter jet on the moon, we seem to hear the artist laugh at the divisions and enmities among humans. When East German diplomats based in Beijing saw this work and asked the artist to remove the "Berlin Wall" and the photographs, he decided to withdraw from the exhibition altogether in order to preserve the work's integrity.  Divided into 9 segments, each containing a number, Pandora's Box (Lot 798) expresses Song Haidong's meditations on the origins of civilisation.