Artwork: Song Dong, *Writing Time with Water,* Beijing, 1995 (documentary photograph of performance)

When Chinese artist Song Dong was a child, in order to not waste paper and ink, Song’s father encouraged him to use water on a stone to practice his calligraphy. This formed the basis for his ongoing artistic practice, especially the series Writing Diary with Water (1995-) where Song kept a daily record of his activities written in water on a dark grey stone. As the characters were created, they would soon evaporate, signifying for Song, “…random fragments of memory, imprecise, incorrect, incomprehensive and incomplete.” Song’s performance highlights the centrality of water in his art, its transience, formless and ephemeral qualities, and he encapsulates this saying, “The allure of water is its formlessness.” This idea informs another series of works that began in Beijing, Writing Time with Water (1995). In an alleyway, Song wrote with a brush dipped in water, the actual time in numbers in a series along the pavement, which formed the substance of the artwork. The performance was documented through photographs: a progression through time as he wrote consecutive time signatures, illustrating how both time and water evaporated in the process. The alley in Beijing became a “tunnel of time”, revealing that as people live their lives, as Confucius is attributed as saying in The Analects, “Time flows away like the water in the river.”