creative forces

Blog # 92… April 2019

China has been much on our minds lately and not in a particularly good way – Huawei, political prisoners caught in the middle of trade wars, canola - seemed a good time for seeing an Ai WeiWei show and tuning in to his sense and sensibility.

The Gardiner Museum continues its creative programming with Unbroken, running until June 9, a small and delicious sample of artist/activist Ai’s work using ceramics as his medium.

Ai flashed across the art world a few years ago when he purposely dropped a Han dynasty vase, (there’s a photo of him doing this) smashing it as a symbol of how he wanted to smash conventions and up-end cultural conventions and materials in his native China. It also references the destruction of many art works during the Cultural Revolution. Obviously, this, along with other acts of rebellion against tradition angered many people, in China particularly.  Ai was imprisoned and now lives in exile in Berlin.

The centerpiece of the show is a tall pillar composed of six large blue and white vases. On first glance, they look like conventional designs, but closer up, the images emerge as scenes of lines of refugees marching across desolate landscapes or camps of tents and children playing in the dust. Using the familiar colours and shape leads us to expect one thing and be shocked by what we see, more effective than columns of print.  

The famous sunflower seeds, each created individually by a pair of hands, appear again (they were in the Tate modern a few years ago and at the AGO too).  This time, they form a pyramid against a background of a series of large Lego panels featuring digitized images of the animals of the Chinese zodiac.

Most of the objets in the show speak in ways both whimsical and serious to boundaries, both real and symbolic, social justice abuses, freedom of speech, and repression of dissent. Two delicately crafted pairs of handcuffs, one in rosewood, the other jade remind us that Ai has direct experience with repression.  He’s paid the price for expressing his ideas, both with time in prison and being forced to live away from his homeland. 

I enjoyed this show with Marian Kenny, a dear friend who died a few days later. This is for her.