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Ai Weiwei
goodlife ceramics, shards, plate pieces newly glazed for Maison Manesse, Zurich, 2017-2023, Photo: Stefan Burger/Aio Frei
Ai Weiwei
Bridget Harvey, MEND MORE Jumper, 2022/23
Ai Weiwei
BOKJA, BOKJA mends, Beirut, 2020, Photo: BOKJA

Ai Weiwei, a participant in documenta and the Venice Biennale, is regarded as a dissident and socially engaged artist. He was imprisoned and barred from traveling until 2015 for making anti-government sentiments during the 2011 Chinese protests. He then fled the country, settling in Berlin until 2019 before moving to England. He has been in exile in Portugal since 2021. Ai Weiwei is a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes art, architecture, design, film, collecting, and curating. The Design Museum London is now displaying the artist’s first-ever design exhibition, “Ai Weiwei: Making Sense“, until July 30.

A collection of site-specific installations are the heart of the show: Hundreds of thousands of things are spread throughout five large “fields” on the floor. Objects shown in this manner range from Stone Age tools to Lego bricks. Ai Weiwei has been collecting them since the 1990s as a result of his fascination with artefacts and traditional arts and crafts. Three of the fields were expressly constructed for this exhibition and are on display for the first time. “Still Life” contains 1,600 late Stone Age tools to remind us that the origins of design are found in survival. Axe heads, chisels, knives, and spinning wheels are shown as a landscape of lost knowledge. “Left Right” consists of fragments of the remains of Ai’s porcelain sculptures, which were destroyed when his studio in Beijing was demolished by the Chinese state in 2018. “Spouts” collects around 200,000 porcelain spouts from tea and wine pots created during the Song Dynasty (960 – 1279 AD). The spout of a teapot was broken off if it was not perfect. “Untitled” (Porcelain Bullets) shows cannonballs built of fine porcelain and used as bullets during the Song Dynasty. “Untitled” (Lego Incident) collects Lego bricks that were donated to Ai after he used them to create portraits of political prisoners in 2014, and Lego subsequently stopped selling them to him. Along with the “fields” are works from all of Ai’s creative phases that explore the tensions between the past and the present, the hand and the machine, the valuable and the worthless, the construction and the destruction. Among them are examples of how Ai has turned something helpful into something useless but valuable by creating products out of precious materials, such as a protective helmet made of glass that is both robust and brittle.

“Ai Weiwei’s fields are extraordinary and tell a story of human ingenuity that spans millennia,” said Justin McGuirk, Chief Curator of the Design Museum and exhibition curator. The fields are a meditation on values, on lost stories and skills, and on the friction between the industrial and the handmade. Their scale is both disturbing and moving.” “This is an exhibition that focuses on a very specific concept: design,” Ai Weiwei explained. I have to consider how we use the Design Museum’s space as a whole, and the exhibition offers an extensive understanding of what design is and how it ties to our past and present.”


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