Song Ziwei – Perfect Days

A certain “awkwardness” has defined the young artist Song Ziwei’s work across her recent exhibitions. She seems to be laboriously making rough, “boring things”—office chairs that run, mugs with ” wireframe glitch,” clock hands that keep twitching, keyboard keys that melt like candles, sighs echoing in smoke. Yet these seemingly “boring” things point to another identity of hers: a nine-to-five office worker.

Song Ziwei’s “boredom” mostly stems from the struggles of working life she has personally experienced. In her work, she spends a great deal of time depicting and piecing together this uncomfortable, absurd life, conveying a personal yet strikingly relatable public sensibility. These small, nuanced individual experiences become her own voice—expressed through her untimely “cleverness”—in an era of artistic production filled with complex issues yet marked by striking homogeneity.

Song Ziwei lives in Tongzhou, Beijing, but commutes to the opposite end of the city for work. In her notes, she describes a typical day: “I struggle to get up at 8 a.m., do a quick wash, and head to work. At my desk, I munch on a frozen rice ball while proofreading typos. At 11, I scroll through my phone to check on the progress of my work. At lunch, I curse my job, then have a quiet moment—discussing plans with AI, and ordering groceries on an app. In the afternoon, more proofreading, a scolding from my boss, and some secret eye-rolling. Finally, work ends. I go home to cook, and eat the bland food while reading the likes from strangers on an e-book app. I write two hundred words of a story, delete them, and stare at the screen in frustration. In the shower, a new artwork idea hits—I dash out and open a shopping app to find readymades. I lie in bed, search for an hour, find nothing. My feet are cold. I get up again, boil some water to fill a hot water bottle, and finally collapse into bed.”

For Song Ziwei, fragmented time and brief pauses are crucial opportunities to enter a state of creation. Her art is like that of the public toilet cleaner in the film Perfect Days (2023): in the gaps of monotonous, repetitive, hard labor, it offers us sparks of the soul. The difference is that the film’s director chooses to show us a romanticized figure suspended between inner world and necessary duties, while Song Ziwei, by attending to reality, lets us directly feel the shared spirit in the artist—the rejection of the pursuit of instant stimulation and efficiency, the refusal to be driven by the imperative of what must be done.

If for Walter Benjamin boredom is “a warm, gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks,” then Song Ziwei’s boredom is more like an umbrella—only when reality keeps falling on it do people hear another world from inside. At this point, the object of her attempt to speak and summon is no longer just the “self” but “kindred spirits.”

The seventh installment of the Taikang Art Museum’s “Rehearsal” A Solo Exhibition Series will commission artist Song Ziwei, allowing more viewers to see how a young artist lives art into being.