A Museum as a Living Body: Davide Quadrio on Song Dong. Soul Out

On 23 October 2026, MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale in Turin opens Song Dong. Soul Out, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Italy. Curated by Li Zhenhua and Davide Quadrio, with Francesca Filisetti and Rebecca Ricci, the site-specific project extends throughout the museum, bringing more than three decades of Song Dong’s practice into dialogue with MAO’s collections and the historic architecture of Palazzo Mazzonis.

ST.ART spoke with MAO director and co-curator Davide Quadrio about the museum as a living body, the remaking of its Chinese galleries, Waste Not, Turin residents’ contribution to Borrow Light and the limits of geographical labels in writing global art history.

Song Dong. Soul Out brings together more than thirty years of the artist’s practice. How did you approach the process of shaping this exhibition?

This exhibition is a portrait of the artist. Or, rather, the museum becomes his body and soul. Each work is an organ, an action, a feeling, a statement. More than a show, the exhibition completes a transformation in what a museum does: MAO becomes matter, a studio and a material for transformation.

It is therefore not a temporary exhibition, an event or an activation, but a new language that gives museum practice a different kind of validation. In this sense, Soul Out is a statement. Song Dong’s practice enters the museum and transforms it until there is no physical or conceptual separation between the new works on display and the collection. Even the architecture becomes part of this extraordinary shift in perception.

What does the title Soul Out mean to you, and how does it inform the way the exhibition can be experienced?

The exhibition grows out of an approach to exhibition-making that we have developed at MAO and previously at the Aurora Museum in Shanghai: connecting the contemporary present with antiquities across a continuous space-time.

The idea of Soul Out began with the remaking of the museum’s Chinese galleries, which mainly contain funerary objects dating from the Han to the Tang dynasties, together with some prehistoric material. We began from the understanding that these were cultural objects rather than fine art in the modern sense, and that many were proto-industrial objects with ritual meanings and functions.

We formed a team and think tank with Laura Vigo and Brian Yue, and invited two artists whose work crosses disciplines, Sissel Tolaas and Gala Porras-Kim. Together, the team recreated a space that physically reflects the idea of a tomb as a sacred, ritual and emotional place between the living and the dead. Entering the new Chinese galleries means entering a narrative space in which the artefacts are distilled and reassessed through their metaphorical meanings, opening them to a universal significance beyond geography and time.

Song Dong’s installation naturally came to mind. We felt that this work was the necessary link for making Made in China, as the Chinese collection will be called from now on, fully contemporary. Waste Not is an ode to the human obsession with possessions that become emotional and spiritual objects. More than 10,000 objects were collected by Song Dong’s mother, Zhao Xiangyuan. The work was first presented in 2005 as a collective family ritual following the death of the artist’s father. Now that his mother has also passed away, each new presentation of the installation becomes a gesture of respect and love for someone in the afterlife. From this installation, the exhibition expands into the museum, the collection and the city of Turin.

Which ideas or tensions in Song Dong’s work became especially important to you while developing the exhibition?

The Daoist principle of the circularity of time, the alchemical and magical interactions within life and the fundamentally social nature of humanity.

How does the exhibition speak to the particular context of MAO and to its audiences in Turin?

As I have explained, the exhibition represents the culmination of our effort to make an exhibition a transformative tool for the museum itself and a transformative experience for the public.

Borrow Light, created with the contribution of Turin residents, has already produced an extraordinary result: a relationship of trust between the museum and its public. In May 2026, we asked people across the city to lend the museum lamps they no longer used for an artwork whose identity had not yet been revealed. The response spread rapidly and within days we had received all the lamps we needed. A central part of the exhibition is therefore a Turin-based installation.

What new relationships emerged between Song Dong’s work, the museum’s spaces and its historical collections?

As I mentioned, there is no hierarchy among the three elements. The space, the collection and Song Dong’s works become part of a single narrative that creates pools of meaning, emotional echoes, alternative stories and, above all, questions.

These are questions about human relationships and their value, the relevance of the modern museum and its collections, and the importance of museums as social spaces that offer places for reflection and emotional experience. Most of all, they concern the museum’s capacity to offer multiple answers and free our critical approaches to what we call life.

How has working on this exhibition influenced your thinking about the role of contemporary art within a museum dedicated to Asian art?

This is an important part of the research we are pursuing at the museum. It is not about contemporary art so much as the idea of a contemporary museum: bringing cultural production into a continuous present. Every artefact was once contemporary.

Working with living artists is a way to reclaim the past as an opportunity to explain the present. Artists are remarkable at doing this.

Having worked extensively between Europe and Asia, how do you see the conversation around presenting Chinese contemporary art in European institutions today?

I think we need to move beyond defining artists geographically. What does “Chinese contemporary art” even mean in the context of a global China? I am much more interested in finding a new language for speaking about non-Western art.

The rewriting of global art history needs to be reclaimed by artists who were born in different contexts and, through their lives, have developed hybrid identities. People shaped by a global China, a global Asia or, better, a global Eurasia understand very well that the division between East and West is constructed and ultimately meaningless.

I am interested in cultural work that speaks through conversations and connections. The world has been created through encounters and cross-pollination. I love the idea of impurity. Cultural impurity is what makes artistic creation unpredictable and, precisely for that reason, so human.

What questions would you like Song Dong. Soul Out to leave with its visitors?

I would like visitors to leave with many questions. It is not for me to determine which ones. The museum’s role is neither to answer nor to lead people towards simplifications. It is to wake them up in non-linear ways.

Too many people are trying to standardise messages, leaving others numb and dependent on prescribed directions. Freedom means thinking outside the box and, ultimately, strengthening our capacity to feel and experience emotion.