Don’t even consider snoozing. This artist is important, a Chinese dissident who was jailed for 84 days in China for giving the finger, literally and figuratively, to the powers that be. His family was banished to a labor camp in China when he was a child, and he was the first of a generation that was allowed to travel to the U.S. for education back in the 1980’s, living in New York and clandestinely bringing the work of artists like Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp to China.
“One small act is worth a million thoughts.” Ai Weiwei
The installation at the Museum of Cycladic Art is in response to the refugee situation on the island of Lesvos, where Ai visited in late 2015 to research and document developments. He wanted to bring greater attention to the crisis and enlisted a local photography club, The Photographic Society of Mytilene to show their work documenting the arrival and transitions of the refugees. The works of these photographers is important and hard to look at. The worst was the terror in the faces of the children. The last image below is a compilation of all Ai’s i-phone photos of the refugees.
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Ai’s sculpture Tyre speaks to the rubber lifebuoys that are littering the beaches of Lesvos, the meager and sometimes useless floatation devices given refugees for their crossing. Some were no more than a child’s flimsy plastic pool toy.
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Combined with Ai’s sculpture and photography this exhibit was both heartbreaking and hopeful, and his words impactful.
This exhibit included other work, including Rebar and Case, highlighting the substandard construction of the schools in China’s Sichuan province, and the devastating earthquake that killed over 5000 trapped children. The small casket with the bent and subpar piece of white rebar was chilling.
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Mask is in response to China’s negligence in dealing with the worsening environmental crisis and record-breaking levels of pollution in Beijing. Carved from a solid block of marble the mask is atop a slab that resembles a tomb. Ironically, marble in classical Chinese war monuments symbolized sacrifice, virtue and purity; a fitting symbol for a people being poisoned by their government’s neglect.
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In Standing Figure, Ai has depicted a standing colossus of marble dropping an urn, mimicking an earlier Ai work called Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, a series of 3 photographs of Ai, straight faced, letting an urn of from the Han Dynasty fall from his hands and shatter at his feet. Between 1966 and 1976 Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution saw the destruction of many significant Chinese artifacts. The Standing Figure speaks to the differing treatment of history by contemporary China and Greece. It made me reflect on the destruction of Middle Eastern antiquities, mosques, churches and ancient sights being perpetrated by terrorists today.
I have not given enough weight to this important exhibit. For additional exploration of Ai Weiwei’s work click here.
“Your own acts tell the world who you are and what kind of society you think it should be.” Ai Wei Wei
Words to live by.
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