Photograph of Cube Light by Cathy Carver
Ai Weiwei has been feted, denounced, debated and attacked. We can decide whether the famed rabble-rouser’s work is worth the hype when According to What?, the 55-year-old conceptual artist’s touring retrospective, opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario last month. It’s the centerpiece of a very Ai Weiwei year in Canada. He Skyped with Laurie Anderson at her Luminato Festival concert in June, and Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads—three-metre-high bronze Chinese zodiac sign busts—was installed beside Toronto’s city hall (until September 22). In October, his 1,200-bike installation Forever Bicycles will be built for all-night festival Nuit Blanche, and Barnaby Martin’s U.K. book Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei will be released in Canada.
A child of the poet Ai Qing, who raised him, in part, in a labour camp, Ai Weiwei is a born dissident. After he established himself as a leader among a new generation of Chinese artists in the 1990s, Ai’s fame skyrocketed in 2008 when he was selected as artistic consultant for the Bird’s Nest stadium at the Beijing Olympics. He later denounced the games, and his subsequent struggles with the Chinese government have been well documented: In 2009, Ai blogged and tweeted about the cranial surgery he had after a police officer allegedly punched him in the face. (He has over 200,000 Twitter followers.) Two years later, the Chinese government detained him for 81 days on the premise of tax evasion, sparking a worldwide outcry.
The documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry shared his unsurprisingly unconventional romantic life; he’s married to Lu Qing yet has a child by another woman (the Chinese authorities threatened to charge him with bigamy). Ai remains in Beijing, under constant government surveillance.
One of Ai’s subjects is the thousands of children killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake—a tragedy due, Ai claims, to the shoddy construction of state-built schools. A sculpture in According to What? is made of rusty rods from these buildings; another is a snake made from children’s backpacks. Ai’s art gets more divisive. There’s the series of photographs in which he gives the finger to global monuments, and another of him breaking a Han Dynasty vase.
Along with his overtly political work, “the exhibition brings the full-scale spatial experience of his broader practice,” says curator Mami Kataoka, revealing his “commitment to the Chinese traditional culture,” as well as “very ordinary and playful parts of his life.” Ai’s brilliance as a sculptor of found objects is evident in Cube Light, a piece that illuminates modernism, lantern traditions and the contemporary Chinese lighting industry via a single crystal chandelier. Art or politics? “For him,” Kataoka says, “everything is one and inseparable.”
Fighting Art: The Controversial Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei
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