Ai Weiwei

Considered by many to be among the world’s most important contemporary artists, Ai Weiwei is now also widely known as one of China’s most prominent dissidents. His work brings together a broad range of themes, including experiments with materials and fabrication techniques, the meaning of artistic production and reproduction, the politics of landscape and space, the history and future of China, freedom of expression and the value of individual lives. Ai has explored these subjects as a photographer and videographer, a maker of objects and installations, a curator and publisher, a builder-architect, an employer of craftspeople and other labourers and a blogger and Twitter user.

This diversity was evident when the touring exhibition “Ai Weiwei: According to What?” visited the Art Gallery of Ontario. It coincided with the installation of two of Ai’s large-scale works at Nathan Phillips Square in front of Toronto’s city hall, one of them a massive version of Forever Bicycles assembled from parts of over three thousand bikes. The conjoined metal tubing and wheel rims gleamed in the late-afternoon sunlight on the day I saw it. At the AGO there was a smaller but nonetheless impressive sculpture made of 42 bicycles from the Forever manufacturing company in China. The circular structure stands on several of the bicycles’ seats—no doubt a sly reference to things being turned upside down, including the promise that these bicycles would last indefinitely, but also referring to the entire state of Chinese culture and society in the face of ongoing modernization and upheaval.

Ai’s work can be seen as a series of gestures that are often humorous and always, he suggests, political. Nowhere is his criticism of established authorities more pointed than in the ongoing series “Study of Perspective,” where Ai photographs his own middle finger raised before monuments of power, ranging from Eiffel’s tower to his own reproduction of Tatlin’s and from Tiananmen to the White House.

Over and over he draws inspiration from artist-prankster Marcel Duchamp. Use a Rembrandt as an ironing board, Duchamp once suggested—or take ancient pottery and photograph yourself letting it fall and smash, as Ai has done with his photo triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn. Ai’s earliest creations include photographs of himself beside one of Duchamp’s works and a ready-made consisting of Chinese shoes bound to an empty bottle with the terribly punning name Château Lafite. Duchamp’s first ready-made was a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool, and Ai has assembled antique wooden stools in the swirling sculpture Grapes. Even his piece Moon Chest—consisting of tall wooden cabinets with holes cut and the chests aligned to show viewers the phases of the moon—reveals the pattern seen in one of Duchamp’s “Rotorelief” optical devices.

It was during his time in the US, mostly New York, between 1981 and 1993 that Ai encountered work by Duchamp as well as Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. The son of prominent Chinese poet Ai Qing, Weiwei grew up in poor conditions far from centres of power and art following his father’s being sent into forced labour in one of Mao’s purges. The family’s exile from Beijing was lifted in time for Weiwei to attend the Beijing Film Academy before heading overseas. On his return to China, Ai Weiwei began to take on key roles in the country’s nascent contemporary art scene. He curated exhibitions and published a series of influential books that exposed Chinese artists to each other’s works as well as those of certain Western artists.

Ai collaborated with the architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron in the design of the now iconic “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics (one wall at the AGO was covered in construction photos from his collection), although he later renounced the Games. In 2006 he was invited to contribute to a Chinese blogging site. Having hardly used the Internet before that, Ai went on a three-year binge of artistic, philosophical and personal speculations mixed with increasingly scathing social commentary—until authorities shut down his blog in 2009. It seemed that blogging brought to the fore the questioning character suggested in the exhibition’s title.

Particularly galling to Chinese officials has been his incessant pestering regarding the unacknowledged number of children who died when their schools collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The quake was a kind of tipping point for Ai in terms of his patience with authorities. For his efforts he has had a studio demolished, been beaten and arrested and is now barred from travelling, just as his international reputation has soared.

Yet he turns out an unending series of works stemming from the quake and its aftermath, including many pieces that were displayed at the AGO. Names of the Student Earthquake Victims Found by the Citizens’ Investigation is a huge chart providing details for over five thousand children who died. There were also photographs and a video documenting the destruction, an audio recording of the victims’ names and the winding Snake Ceiling made from hundreds of student backpacks. Perhaps the most astonishing work in the exhibition is Straight, comprising 38 tonnes of formerly mangled steel rebar recovered from schoolhouses and very carefully placed to form a large rectangle with apparent fault lines. Only one part of the AGO’s exhibition space was deemed capable of holding its weight.

In recent years, Ai has said more than once that he might wish to disappear—perhaps as Duchamp suggested, the great artist of tomorrow would go underground. But Ai speaks of disappearance as if levelling an accusation. “Maybe I’m just an undercover artist in the disguise of a dissident; I couldn’t care less about the implications,” he told an interviewer. In any case, his work seems unlikely to recede from the spotlight anytime soon. ❚

“Ai Weiwei: According to What?” was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, from August 17 to October 27, 2013.

Phil Koch writes, edits and studies from Winnipeg.