The Brooklyn Rail

At this time of social upheaval, artist Ai Weiwei’s presence in all his works spanning his four-decade career reverberates more powerfully than ever. Given his fame, Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei, his first US retrospective in over a decade on view at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), which features his work in all mediums—crafts, voice, film, sculpture, and activism—feels late, but perhaps has arrived at the most relevant time.

Weiwei’s objects are found, familiar, and simultaneously personal and universal. More than 130 objects included in the exhibition range from dust to bricks, stools to bicycles, and porcelains to a mailbox. Their very familiarity holds a profound impact when one reads their social implications. Developing upon Duchampian readymades, his objects are culturally specific embodiments, representing Chinese craft and culture. Divided sectionally, the exhibition’s first chapter, “Introducing the Rebel,” opens with a neon sign, F.U.C.K. (2000), greeting visitors with a sense of humor. The word is a pun on the word “fake,” which is pronounced as “fah-kuh” in Mandarin, and also refers to Weiwei’s studio name, FAKE Design Studio, in Beijing. The defiant messaging of the sign echoes in an adjacent photographic series, “Study of Perspective” (1995–2011), in which the artist is pictured pointing his middle finger toward various landmarks around the world, including the Forbidden City, the Eiffel Tower, and the White House. Playfully, he twists the measuring gesture according to a single-point perspective. Finally, a bronze series, including the sculpture Arm with the Finger in Bronze (2000) is installed in the center of the gallery, solidifying and amplifying Weiwei’s rebellion against authority and power.

The first gallery also includes one of his iconic photographs, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), which prefigured his recurring and overarching subject—destruction and resistance. The photo triptych captures Weiwei smashing a two-thousand-year-old artifact—an emblem of Chinese history—which at the time of its making drew much controversy. However, unlike iconoclasm, his provocative act was intended to challenge the cultural values and traditions that have been imposed and shaped by all forms of power. The following section of the show, “Material Disruptions,” continues exploring Weiwei’s witty intervention of existing concepts and everyday materials influenced by Marcel Duchamp, Dadaism, and Andy Warhol. Yet, Weiwei’s readymades are charged with emotionality and criticality. His Shovel with Fur (1986)—reminiscent of Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915)—evokes the arms of his father Ai Qing, who was a famous, revolutionary poet, exiled, and forced to hard labor shoveling excrement from communal toilets. Violin Shoe (1985) portrays the hindrance of intellectual and artistic activities under the Communist ideology that urged for labor. Among these Dada-inspired objects, another ancient urn appears with a Coca-Cola logo overpainted on its surface, representing the convoluted entanglement of antiquity and modernity, and the West and East. The daring superimposition of the print on such a historical artifact disturbs the viewer.

The subsequent galleries survey the ways in which Weiwei develops his readymades (stools, porcelains, bicycles, and the like) into multiples. Proliferate in uniformity and repetition, his readymades often symbolize the people of China and the “Made in China” phenomenon. Most notably, Sunflower Seeds—his most celebrated work, first installed at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2010—is reinterpreted at SAM, featuring one ton of tiny, handmade porcelain sunflower seeds made by numerous artisans in a pyramidal stack. (The original iteration comprised more than one hundred million handmade seeds). The mass subdues each seed’s singularity, analogizing the nation’s conformity under censorship. Weiwei further pushes the concept of real versus fake in Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (Gold) (2010). Among the twelve zodiac animal heads that once adorned the fountain at the Yuanmingyuan (The Old Summer Palace), many were looted by foreign troops during the Second Opium War, with only seven of them known and recovered by Chinese museums. Weiwei recreated the five lost pieces to complete the full circle, painted in gold to venerate the national treasure. Destabilizing the obsession with original over replica, he addresses the objects’ complicated history head on, noting that “without twelve, it’s not a zodiac.”

The exhibition’s final section, “Watching Ai Watching Power,” displays a giant snake made up of school backpacks stretched out across the museum’s central ceiling. At first glance, the work Snake Ceiling (2009) appears to be a cliché celebration of the Year of the Snake. However, the objects are a poignant representation of the thousands of children who died in the devastating Sichuan earthquake in 2008. A turning point for Weiwei, this tragic event fueled his activism for human rights. Weiwei researched the 5,219 student victims’ names and birthdays to commemorate them, while inquiring into the poor construction of the school buildings that the government tried to hide. His citizen investigation led to Weiwei’s detention for eighty one days in an undisclosed location in 2011, which is reproduced as a life-sized mockup jail in the gallery juxtaposed with a hundred metal rebars salvaged from the sites of schools.

Over the years since then, Weiwei has been censored, beaten, and harassed by the Chinese government. His iconic selfie—posted online right before he was taken into custody by the police in 2009—is recreated with LEGO. Titled Illumination (2019), the glittering toy bricks augment the grids beneath the flashlight in the photographic selfie, which is evocative of both digital pixelation and tessera, ancient mosaic tiles. Such excessive physicality fossilizes the volatile digital image, memorializing and transforming the moment of arrest into a statement of resistance. Exiting the gallery of maximalist grids, one will spot two surveillance cameras sculpted in marble: Surveillance Camera (2010), attached to a high corner of the room, and Surveillance Camera with Plinth (2015) centered in the gallery. As Weiwei said to this author, “Surveillance is the monumental phenomenon of our time,” and these marbleized cameras stand as symbols he continues to rebel against. Ai Weiwei is present.