Ai Weiwei and the hidden lives of objects
AI WEIWEI IS a master of spectacle. In 1995 he produced three black-and-white photographs in which he smashed what looked like a 2,000-year-old urn; it was not clear whether the ceramic was real or a fake. In 2010 he covered the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern with 100m handmade porcelain sunflower seedsa reference both to Chinese Communist Party imagery, wherein Mao Zedong represented the sun, and a symbol of brighter times to come. A huge sculpture at the Royal Academy in 2015 was designed to evoke horror as well as awe. Mr Ai arranged 90 tonnes of steel reinforcing bars in one gallery: they had been retrieved from schools destroyed in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, which had killed more than 5,000 children. A new show, Making Sense, which recently opened at the Design Museum in London, includes several large-scale works. (Mr Ai stores his materials between his vast studios and warehouses.) The artist persuaded the museum to strip out the internal walls from its ground-floor gallery space so he could lay out five fields of collected artefacts, among them Neolithic tools and the spouts of broken teapots. One installation is a collection of porcelain cannonballs dating from the Song dynasty, a period part of Chinas Golden Age (pictured below). Porcelain is evocative of wealth and refinement in the country, but here the material was put to bloodier purpose; some of the pieces still smell of gunpowder from their previous use in the weapons. Such duality, evident in the sunflower seeds, is typical of Mr Ais work. He has been obsessed with accruing items since he was a child, he says, when he would fill baskets with bits of wood and arrange them in delicate piles. In particular, Mr Ai remembers looking for materials in Little Siberia, a region near Xinjiang, in Chinas far west. His father, Ai Qing, was a famous poet who had fallen out with the authorities during the Cultural Revolution and been sent into internal exile. The pair lived in a ramshackle shelter for several years. The catalogue notes that a key theme of the show is what humans choose to keep and what to destroy. For Mr Ai, collecting may be a way of counteracting official efforts to rewrite Chinas history; physical objects ground citizens experiences in something tangible. In his memoir of 2021, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, he laments that life in China was shrouded in the thick fog of the dominant political narrative: In satisfying the demands of the new order, the Chinese people suffered a withering of spiritual life and lost the ability to tell things as they had truly occurred. His attempts to speak openly have landed him in hot water with the party in recent years. Mr Ai helped design Beijings Birds Nest stadium for the Olympics in 2008, but refrained from attending the opening ceremony due to his concern about the governments growing repression. We must bid farewell to autocracy, he wrote. Whatever shape it takes, whatever justification it gives, authoritarian government always ends up trampling on equality, denying justice and stealing happiness and laughter from the people. In the years that followed Mr Ai became increasingly critical of Chinese corruption. He was particularly vocal about how shoddily built schools had contributed to the devastating loss of life in the Sichuan earthquake. Officials clamped down on the artist. In 2011 he was detained at Beijing airport on suspicion of economic crimes and held for 81 days. His studio in Shanghai was destroyed. Since 2015 he has lived between Britain, Germany and Portugal. Despite their magnitude, his pieces do not seem impersonal, inspired as they are by Chinese history and people. Making Sense further underlines how Mr Ais early life shaped his approach to art. For Water Lilies #1 he has interpreted Claude Monets famous series in Lego bricks. On one level, this is one of the artists sly jibes at modern culture which, as he wrote in this newspaper, he thinks is unduly influenced by profit-driven companies. Yet at the centre of the 15-metre-long artwork is a large dark patchreminiscent of a photograph Mr Ai showed your correspondent of the shack in Little Siberia which he shared with his father. The Lego painting may well be a comment on the difficulties of reproduction and the qualities that are lost when transmuting art between modes. Or, given that he sees his work as connected with the human condition and human dignity, perhaps he is juxtaposing the joy Monet found in his garden in Giverny with the cruelty Mr Ais own family suffered. For all objects, even plastic bricks, are vessels of history. Ai Weiwei: Making Sense continues at the Design Museum, London, until July 30th