(London) He doesn’t like being locked into narrow concepts: the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, often presented as a political dissident, sees himself more as a “dissident of human unconsciousness”, which he denounces in an exhibition at London with unprecedented monumental installations.
This exhibition, called Making Sense is the artist’s biggest in the British capital for eight years. It opens Friday until July 30 at the design museum.
Many works are presented to the public for the first time there, and question the meaning we give to objects, what they say about our history, in particular that of China, which Ai Weiwei had to leave in 2015 to have criticized the government too much.
“Design is a word that has to do with all human activities, and all my work revolves around this idea of design”, of construction, explains Ai Weiwei to AFP.
In fact, the artist unveils works in which the objects, some of which he has patiently collected for decades, are diverted from their primary use to serve as material for the construction of works never empty of political message.
Thus, this reinterpretation of one of the canvases of the famous series of water lilies by Claude Monet with 650,000 Lego bricks, and in which Ai Weiwei added a black shadow.
It represents a door to the province of Xinjiang, where China is accused of violating the human rights of Muslim minorities. Ai Weiwei and his father, the poet Ai Qing, revered by the former Communist leaders before being suppressed by the Communist Party, lived there for a few years in exile when he was a very young child.
On the floor, a vast rectangle is made up of multitudes of broken pieces of blue Chinese porcelain. These are sculptures destroyed in the artist’s studio at the time of dismantling by the authorities in 2018.
A little further on, hundreds of thousands of teapot spouts made by hand over 1,000 years ago are spread out on the ground, illustrating the age of porcelain production in China.
China “more brutal”
“All the things that Ai Weiwei has collected over the years represent so many proofs of different stories, different cultural moments in the history of China,” explains Justin McGuirk, the curator of the exhibition.
“Ai Weiwei always manages to create from destruction, and plays with the idea of construction, and all this often resonates with what is happening in China,” he adds.
The artist is not really optimistic about the direction taken by his country of origin. “China is not becoming a more civilized society, but rather more brutal against anyone with different ideas,” regrets Ai Weiwei, who sees as “natural” the new tensions between the Asian giant and the West.
“China feels that it has the power and the right to redefine the world order”, that it “can have an important role in changing the rules, defined by the Western world”, he adds.
But China is not the artist’s only target. Two huge snakes made of life jackets and rucksacks are dedicated to the refugees who have died over the past twenty years trying to reach Europe.
And the artist unveils new versions of his famous photographs of middle fingers taken in front of symbols of power or culture, such as the Palace of Westminster in London, the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Trump Tower in New York.
More than a Chinese dissident “I am a dissident of human unconsciousness and injustice”, proclaims Ai Weiwei.
“Europe has been at peace for the last 70 or 80 years, but during this time many problems have arisen or developed. […] Human conditions are not good, and freedom of expression is probably also in danger, “said the artist, who defines himself as a perpetual “outsider”, now settled in Portugal, after having lived in the United States, in China. or in Germany.