Ai Weiwei and the hidden lives of objects
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 China’s “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 Ai’s 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 China’s 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".
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