ART | TALENT
ABOUT
Does freedom demand courage, or are the two inseparable? For Ai Weiwei, they are sides of the same coin. The artist has become world-renowned for transforming commonplace materials, objects and actions into powerful political and social statements, revealing their meaning through formal subversion and scale: One surveillance camera sculpted from marble. Three Han Dynasty urns, dropped. Fourteen thousand life jackets across the facade of Berlin’s Konzerthaus. One hundred million hand-crafted porcelain sunflower seeds scattered throughout the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Ninety tonnes of steel rebars, recovered from the rubble of the Sichuan earthquake, straightened by hand and displayed across the ground floor of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
Spanning installation, activism, and investigation, Ai’s boldly provocative and conceptually rigorous work has earned him international acclaim while provoking intense scrutiny in his homeland. His experience as a dissident artist, coupled with that of his father’s exile, have shaped a practice that is art and activism: a platform for resistance and truth that resonates across East and West.
Talent: Ai Weiwei
Photographer: Dudi Hasson
