This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.
For more than 40 years, Ai Weiwei has transformed personal experiences, empathy and global politics into visionary art forms that tickle the eye and challenge the brain, making him one of the world’s most cerebral conceptual artists.
“Given everything you’ve done,” I asked him here at the Seattle Art Museum, where a major retrospective of his work is on exhibit, “do you consider yourself first an artist, a social critic or a political activist?”
“I like to have labels,” he said. “To be ‘artist’ will not offend me.” So far, so good. But then he said, “I prefer to be a critic or some kind of historical thinker or social activist.”
In truth, Ai Weiwei, at 67, is all those things as evidenced by this, his largest show ever in the U.S., “Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei.” With more than 130 pieces from the 1980s to the current decade, it tracks his progression from painting, which he abandoned early, to social criticism through ordinary objects reimagined to symbolize his take on human rights, freedom of speech, Chinese culture and disasters, both natural and man-made.
The show, which opened here in March and runs through Sept. 7, highlights work from his formative years in his native Beijing through 12 years in New York, where he attended the Parsons School of Design, honed skills as a photographer and began infusing western culture into his work. He then went back to China for 22 years and spent the last 10 in Europe, where he now splits time between a Lisbon suburb and his studio in Berlin, with an occasional trip to visit his son at school in Cambridge, England.
The works here reveal his fascination for almost anything as a medium for making a point, including wood, steel, marble, photographs, film, video, social media and one of his recent favorites, Lego bricks.
Many examples are sprinkled with irony and sarcasm, and almost all of them are laden with deeper meaning, which enhances an appreciation of any particular piece.
One gallery especially makes the point with three related installations that represent Ai’s reaction to the earthquake that killed an estimated 69,000 people, with thousands more reported missing, in Sichuan Province in 2008. One piece is an inkjet print bearing the names of 5,219 children who perished, an accounting he made possible by recruiting survivors to knock on doors to learn who died — something he accused the government of failing to do. On the floor is a jungle of mangled metal bars known as rebar from destroyed buildings. High above it all is a meandering snake made of 857 children’s backpacks, another reminder of loss.
“I would say I’m not directly connected to creating art,” he said, explaining his thought process, “but rather creating human emotions, criticism, judgment and argument, all those things.”
Other works, too, carry messages not immediately discerned. A 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn is painted with a red Coca-Cola logo, signifying Western incursion into Chinese culture after the Chinese communist leader Deng Xiaoping opened the country to foreign investment in 1979. Another urn from the same period is seen in a photo triptych with the images showing it in Ai’s hands, then in midair, then on the ground, smashed to bits. To Ai, it underscores the ease of erasing history.
A pile of hand-painted porcelain “sunflower seeds,” one ton of them, symbolizes other concepts. They were among 100 million “seeds” displayed at the Tate Modern in London 15 years ago, all of them crafted by 1,600 local Chinese artisans. Ai intended them to reflect the ubiquitous notion of “Made in China” as well as a childhood memory of propaganda posters depicting Chairman Mao Zedong as the sun surrounded by sunflowers symbolizing ordinary Chinese citizens.
“That is something I cannot repeat, and I don’t think anybody can challenge it because the work requires a highly skilled craftsmanship,” he said. “And, it’s part of the history of China.”
The earthquake tragedy marked a dramatic change in his approach to art. It began a period of widening his lens to address global issues, often using mundane objects to make a point. But it also brought him trouble. After criticizing the government for its failure to investigate the devastation, he was placed in detention for 81 days in 2011 without formal charges. Most likely, he said, it was for his accusations that shoddy building construction added to the death toll.
Two years after his release, he moved to Europe and has never returned to China.
Immersed again in Western culture, Ai began using Legos as a frequent tableau, and the exhibition includes several examples, some shown for the first time.
They include a sardonic stab at the United States, with a massive replication of the first page of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian influence in the 2016 U.S. election, a world premiere showing. Stand back, and it’s an easy-to-read pixelated facsimile. Move closer, and the interlocking Legos show their individuality, even bands of black ones that reflect redacted sections of Mueller’s report.
Adjacent to that page is the Lego-built Mueller Report title page, in its first U.S. appearance.
To Ai, they represent political intrigue and the fragility of democracy, as does a tattered U.S. mailbox, an ordinary object he uses to mock the controversy over mail-in ballots in the 2020 election campaign.
Among other Lego works are several that appear as paintings. One is a vibrant scene of a body washed ashore under a blue sky, titled “After the Death of Marat.” It represents the 2-year-old Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, who died on a Turkish beach in 2015 in his family’s effort to flee to Greece. Ai uses it to draw attention to the worldwide plight of refugees. But here, the dead body depicted is Ai himself.
In the face of international criticism for trivializing the boy’s death, he insisted it was more important to draw attention to the dangers facing desperate immigrants.
“That’s why he’s an artist,” said Foong Ping, the exhibition’s curator. “He illuminates whatever is around him and uses ways to us that are unimaginable. Who else uses rebar in art?”
Other odd-looking works carry their own meanings — a mash-up of wooden stools, 42 bicycles welded together, a white plush chair made of marble, a three-legged wooden table with one leg on the floor, the two others on adjacent walls.
The exhibition was put together in one year, lightning speed for any major museum presentation. Through a colleague, Foong met Larry Warsh, a New York art book publisher and collector who began buying Ai’s works in 2002 as he was amassing a large collection of contemporary Chinese art. More than 80 pieces in the Seattle show are his. “My goal,” he said in an interview, “is to help create an Ai museum to benefit generations to come.”
Ai attended a preview of the Seattle show, then returned to Europe. Still traveling on a Chinese passport, he said, he has crossed more than 300 borders in the last 10 years, always growing anxious when going through immigration.
“They give me all sorts of trouble,” he said. “Most of them ask me odd questions; my heart starts to bounce. I wish I could cross easily.”
While China remains in his heart, his itinerancy, he said, makes him feel like a man without a home. But he is also set apart by his work, an unusual fusion of social activism, life lessons and creative whimsy, singular among contemporary global artists.
“You come into the world, like me, almost 68 years, you still cannot find some kind of ease and comfort in the intellectual sense, to feel some kind of belonging,” he said. “I’m always an outsider, a loner; that is my general condition.”
His creations here seem to reflect as much; they suggest he stands alone.
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