EXHIBITION: AI WEIWEI – UNDER CONSTRUCTION

BY AMELIA GROOM 

A pioneering figure in China’s thriving contemporary art scene, Ai Weiwei has been in Sydney this week unveiling two major projects at Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) and Campbelltown Arts Centre (CAC).

A cultural commentator, publisher, curator, architect and artist, for the last two decades Ai Weiwei has been both provoking and honouring Chinese aesthetic tradition, and making bold political statements through his art. Ai Weiwei: Under Construction is the first international survey of his work.

Filling the entire gallery space at SCAF is a specially commissioned installation, Through. Made from deconstructed Qing Dynasty tables and ancient temple beams, it’s a dramatic structure that the viewer is forced to navigate. Like much of his work, it is about destruction and reinvention – it simultaneously challenges the value society invests in historic artefacts, and respects cultural history by salvaging the pieces and giving them new life.

In documented performances, Ai Weiwei has smashed a Han Dynasty urn and blue-and-white dragon bowls. In another series, he painted the Coca-Cola logo on ceramic vases from the Neolithic Age (5000-3000BC), referencing Warhol and commenting on history, modernity, transience and consumerism. Some of these pieces are currently at SCAF, where more than 45 of the artist’s sculpture, photograph, video and installation works from 1985 to the present are on show.

Both venues are also exhibiting parts of Ai Weiwei’s ambitious and audacious work Fairytale, which he did for last year’s Documenta XII in Kassel. Wanting to put ordinary people at the centre of his art, he took 1,001 people from China to Europe (they were plucked from obscurity via his blog and many had never left the country) as a sort of human installation, which he documented in video footage and photographs.

Much of Ai Weiwei’s childhood was spent in a remote province of Xianjiang with his father Ai Qing – one of China’s most respected modern poets, who was banished during the Communist era for being an enemy of the state. These early years were a period of cultural and social deprivation, and questions of lost identity, independent critical thinking, human rights, historical memory, exile and cultural violence have consistently informed his practice.

The artist’s most recent high profile work was his ‘Birds Nest’ concept design of the Beijing Olympic Stadium, on which he collaborated with architects Herzog & de Meuron. That he was commissioned for this attests to his renewed status within the arts and official hierarchies of China, but he hasn’t silenced his criticism of the government’s attempts to politicise the Olympic Games.

Ai Weiwei: Under Construction makes evident how the artist has also sought to dismantle notions of modernity, western influence and hegemony in China, and to playfully challenge accepted cultural, artistic and social values. Seen alongside each other, his works demonstrate that history and identity are not stable entities, but forever under construction.

Ai Weiwei: Under Construction
Until June 29
Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation
16’20 Goodhope Street, Paddington
www.sherman-scaf.org.au
Campbelltown Arts Centre
Cnr Camden & Appin Roads, Campbelltown
www.campbelltown.nsw.gov.au/aww
Admission to both venues is free