S . O . N . G . W . E . I

Beijing, oktober 2009. In a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of town, Rieneke de Vries meets a homeless man. Name: Song Wei. Used to be: successful businessman and collector of Chinese contemporary art. Now: psychiatric patient.

Beijing, 1989 – a turbulent year. "China/Avant Garde" draws attention: for the first time a retrospective of contemporary Chinese art is acknowledged by the government. Song Wei partially finances the exhibition. Afterwards he buys work of the participating artists.
Same year, some months later: In the capital a political manifestation takes place at the worldfamous central square. Amongst the participants are artists, some of them financially supported by Song Wei. 'I do not mention names of places and events. This site has to remain visible in China,' says Rieneke de Vries, visual artist and producer of this website.

De Vries meets Song Wei in 2009, the same week as in which the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China takes place: 'I heard Song Wei was enclosed. All unwanted persons had to be taken out of sight for the National Holiday.' […] 'Along with an interpreter, we entered a building with barred windows and shiny, polished hallways. We were cordially received by a man in a white coat carrying a file under his arm. He took us to the visitors’ area. After a few moments, Song Wei entered: a short, skinny man wearing a blue-white striped suit – a mixture between prison clothes and pyjamas. […] 'The conversation was a succession of language barriers, misunderstandings, prejudices on my part and expectations on his. He thought I was a famous journalist. I thought: 'What medicine is he on? Why is he in here? Is he speaking incoherently or do I understand him poorly?' After about an hour the doctor entered again and took him away. They disappeared behind a double metal door. Click, locked.' De Vries: 'The obscurity of it all is what stayed with me most. And yet I feel very emotionally involved: in Song Wei as a person, in psychiatry, in people without a voice, in language, in images.'

www.songwei.eu is not about Song Wei alone. The site is an installation of opinions. 'This site is about how quickly one can be absorbed by one's own thoughts, assumptions and excitement. It's about the human view, about perspectives, about how everything can be true at the same time, or the exact opposite, and about the difficulty of getting to the very core of something.'

Special thanks to:
Klaas Burger, Song Wei, Mark van den Heuvel (design), Marisa Rappard en Yves Brandsma (translation English), Rose Wang en Mona Wang (translation Mandarin), Koen te Brinke (websitebuilding), Zheng XueWu, Guo Xinxin (interpreter) and Cecilia Freschini.

The Songwei project is supported by The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture