Ai Weiwei Under Construction

Front Cover Through, 2007–08 Detail Iron wood (Tieli wood), Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), tables, parts of beams and pillars from dismantled temples of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) 400 x 800 x 1340 cm Installation view, Ai Weiwei’s studio, Beijing Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

Back Cover Marble Chair, 2008 Marble 125 x 52 x 50 cm Commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney Courtesy the artist, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne and Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney

Ai Weiwei: Under Construction

Ai Weiwei: Under Construction Charles Merewether

Contents

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Preface

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Gene Sherman

Introduction

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Lisa Havilah

Ruins in Reverse A Fork in the Road Readymade New York Matters of Perspective Dropping China Under the Hammer Principles of Antinomy A Space In-Between The One and the Many Duration WithinTime A Matter of Fact Being Chinese

25 29 33 49 59 63 67 81 85 97 113 125

Commissions 137 Artist’s Biography

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Artist’s Bibliography

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List of Works

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Contributors 154 Acknowledgements 155 Index 156

Charles Merewether

Preface

Local Wine Bar and Restaurant,1 over the years, provided culinary fare and a regular meeting point for residents of Sydney’s historic, colourful, conserved Victorian precinct in Paddington. It welcomed a mix of gallerists, art and design professionals, and occupants of the mixed-use medium density terrace housing that clusters around and beyond the roundabout reaching northward and southward to the main arterial routes of the city’s Eastern Suburbs.

On 3 June 2006 one such group – artist Ai Weiwei, his wife Lu Qing, Brian Sherman and myself – were locked in deep conversation over a somewhat lengthy, vegetarian lunch. Both artists – in town for the installation of their work featured in Charles Merewether’s ‘Zones of Contact’ Biennale of Sydney – had been invited artists-in-residence at the Sherman Visual Arts Residency (SVAR), a late nineteenth-century cottage refurbished by Mark Gazy (Tzannes Associates), positioned directly across the street from Sherman Galleries. An earlier occupant, Yin Xiu Zhen, had come for the previous Sydney Biennale.The Sherman Foundation tradition of offering support to artists from the Asia-Pacific region, which had evolved in varying ways over the then nineteen-year lifespan of the gallery, had found, in 2004, an added focus by including creative people within the gallery’s complex of buildings. Artists, writers, academics, filmmakers, curators and museum directors had, over a relatively short space of time, enjoyed the space and its unique surrounds whilst participating in different ways and levels in the life of the gallery.

The luncheon conversation was animated. It began with a sharing of backgrounds and histories: China and NewYork for AiWeiwei; Lithuania, France, England, South Africa and Australia for the Sherman family. Lu Qing’s participation was confined mostly to body language and gesture, her English not quite good enough to engage in a four-way conversation.Yet her presence was keenly felt, with AiWeiwei’s translation and transmission of information and nuance evident in the emotional pitch of the discussion.

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Ai Weiwei’s work was known to me at the time.Through my engagement with Asia since the late 1980s (a trip to Japan in 1987 had been the impetus for some fifty trips to the region over almost two decades) and during subsequent travels toTaiwan,2 Singapore, Hong Kong and mainland China, I had purposefully entered into conversation with the generation of artists who were practising individually and collectively within the context of tiny, dedicated audiences and non-commercial parameters. Connecting with key creative people of the period – those who formed the nexus of what has since become an army of practitioners, coupled with an outpouring of varying quality work – had been fuelled further and on home turf through a group of Chinese artists, notably Guan Wei, Ah Xian and Liu Xiao Xian.

Their 1989 visit to Sherman Galleries led to two early exhibitions, ‘Echoes of China from Behind the Bamboo Curtain:Three Contemporary Chinese Artists’ (1991) and ‘Orientations:The Emperor’s New Clothes’ (1992), curated by Claire Roberts, then Curator of Asian Decorative Arts and Design at the Powerhouse Museum.3The hugely ambitious and highly successful Brisbane-based Asia-PacificTriennial of Contemporary Art had, from 1993, provided previously undreamed-of opportunities to engage with the gamut of regional practitioners, curators and writers. A context had been long established into which our conversation took place.

Ai Weiwei, as dissident conceptual artist and curator, in 2000, of Eastlink Gallery’s ‘Fuck Off’ exhibition in Shanghai,4 formed part of the story. Objects from his New York period constructed of everyday materials such as coat-hangers (Hanging Man, 1985), shoes (One-Man Shoe, 1987), and violins and shovels (Violin, 1985) had penetrated the collective consciousness of an expanding group of curators and intellectuals. His Marcel Duchamp work, To Be Looked At (From the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 1985, was a familiar image, as was Safe Sex, 1986.The latter, a fully buttoned raincoat with a condom attached at crotch height, humorously commented on the ‘problematics of intimacy’.5 The bare bones of Ai Weiwei’s life story – compellingly shared with us over lunch – is now the stuff of literally hundreds of articles on contemporary art published in key American and European art magazines and more broadly in the press and on the web – not to mention substantial television interviews and overviews.The moral implications of his journey

were clear to us then and formed the basis of a connection that intensified during a studio visit in May 2007, made together with colleague Simeon Kronenberg,6 and leading directly to the idea of showcasing Ai Weiwei’s work in Sydney to coincide with the 2008 launch of the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF).

Ai Weiwei understands the importance of independent critical thinking.

He has steadfastly refused to kowtow to Chinese government pressures or gratefully acknowledge the status now officially conferred upon him by the still all-powerful government and bureaucracy. After twenty years of family exile – and forced to share in the disgrace of his revered father, the poet Ai Qing – Ai Weiwei’s moral fibre was fashioned during his formative years and has never left him. Sharing experiences somewhat akin, perhaps, to Nelson Mandela, whose twenty-seven year incarceration and removal from normal societal interaction left him a formidable and enduring ethical role model, Ai Weiwei continues to fashion the cultural landscape of China resolutely, collaboratively, courageously and with uncompromising rigour. He may have co-designed the signature Beijing Olympic Stadium (with Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron), yet refuses to be part of the propaganda machine that uses his creative work, or internationally acclaimed name, to legitimise the regime; a regime which, whilst blotting out historical memory of turbulent early decades, simultaneously sidesteps the rights of migrant workers swept to the margins of a vibrant society undergoing both physical and metaphorical reconstruction.7 How did this moral high ground enter into our lunchtime exchange?

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, and in the first instance, it was through discussions about Apartheid South Africa. Brian and I as newlyweds had attended a Soweto function celebrating the formation of the first South African black bank, a venture in which my late father had – despite potential punitive governmental reactions – played an advisory role. Members of our immediate family were implicated in anti-government activities and assisted in risky endeavours to escape politically driven police interrogation, ultimately moving to the safety and sanity of London.8 Finally we, too, emigrated: a failed attempt to Melbourne in 1964 (one of a tiny group of South African families increasingly unable to tolerate the discriminatory practices underpinning every aspect of the regime’s

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structure and governance); a London sojourn in the early 1970s; and the final move to Sydney in 1976.

Ai Weiwei, despite the significant language and cultural barriers separating us, seemed to understand intuitively the issues brought to light. Both he and Lu Qing responded with similar deep understanding when Brian described the mission of our family-funded foundation, Voiceless, co-founded with our daughter Ondine, through which some eight lawyers and administrators tirelessly work to increase awareness of the conditions in which factory-farmed and other animals are forced to live.The conversation, underpinned by common concerns, intensified and the bonds between us strengthened and broadened as the potential scope of this nascent social justice movement, as well as the economic and governmental obstacles in its way, resonated across the table.The idea of an Ai Weiwei–Sherman family 2008 collaboration was, in principle, sealed.

We felt a connection without understanding how it might unfold and where precisely it would lead.

And so it has come to pass.The decision to launch the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation in 2008 was announced in February 2007.

A meeting with art historian, scholar and Sydney Biennale 2006 artistic director Charles Merewether, at whose invitation the artists had travelled to Sydney, resulted in the decision to commission a major new work by Ai Weiwei and to create a substantial publication – one that would give Merewether the opportunity of expanding upon and updating his earlier work on the artist, Ai Weiwei Works: Beijing 1993–2003.

Campbelltown Arts Centre (CAC), directed by the immediately responsive and enthusiastic Lisa Havilah, agreed to partner the project. With additional funding and staff resources, a larger scale survey show curated

by Charles Merewether became possible.This would include a parallel commissioned work for CAC, situated in the rapidly expanding western outskirts of Sydney, home to an extensive and growing Asian population.9 The story of an initial shared conversation reflects ultimately the notion of shared values. Ai Weiwei’s rise to prominence in the international arts arena has been thoroughly documented. He has become, and will remain, a key cultural figure of our time.Throughout the European summer of 2007, both his absurdly ambitious and deeply poignant Fairytale project and the

sculpture Template (constructed from carved doors and windows salvaged from old Chinese houses and subsequently destroyed on site by a powerful storm), dominated the major quinquennial exhibition, Documenta XII. He manifestly occupies a core position in the early twenty-first century creative spectrum. However, Ai Weiwei’s moral stance and stature, untouched by subsequent attention and fame, remains the underpinning for the Sherman family’s decision to invite the artist to reconnect with Sydney via the seminal Through, 2007–08.This monumentally scaled installation of morphed tables constitutes the culminating work of the series and is the first commissioned project for the Paddington space in its new incarnation as the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.

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Dr Gene Sherman Chair and Executive Director Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

1. Local Wine Bar and Restaurant, 211 Glenmore Road, closed in August 2007. It has been reborn as L’etoile Restaurant and Bar. 2. TheTaiwan visit related to organising Sherman Galleries’ international exhibition, ‘Systems End’, which travelled to Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art (31 October 1996 – 16 March 1997) after a regional tour to Oxy Gallery, Osaka, Japan (19 April – 19 May 1996); Hakone Open Air Museum, Japan (31 May – 28 July 1996); and Dong–Ah Gallery, Seoul, Korea (14 August – 4 September 1996).

3. Dr Claire Roberts is now Research Fellow, Division of Pacific and Asian History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, Canberra.

4. Eastlink Gallery Director Li Liang had lived in Australia and over several years was a regular Sherman Galleries visitor.

5. Britta Erickson, ‘Ai Weiwei’, Grove Dictionary of Art Online, Oxford University Press, quoted in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Asia: China, auction catalogue, 20 September 2007, p. 122.

6. Simeon Kronenberg, Director (formerly Associate Director), Sherman Galleries (2003–07).

7. Geremie Barmé, in his essay ‘Sharing values’ (Griffith Review, edn 18, Griffith University Press, summer 2007–08, pp. 47–50), castigates governments, including the ruling powers in both Singapore and China, for attempting to define, control and export cultural identity. He advocates ‘a regional pluralism as the guarantee of heterodoxy and independence’ (p. 49) and defines culture as ‘the product of constant flux, the co-creation of numerous individuals, groups or collectives’ (p. 47), without whose flux and flow the notion becomes both deadening and devoid of meaning.

8. Founder and Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg, Lloyd Vogelman, Brian’s cousin, was heavily implicated in anti-apartheid activities. Constantly watched and occasionally actively harassed, he finally made his way to Australia in 1997.

9. In 2006, 292,332 people in Sydney had Chinese ancestry; in Australia as a whole, 669,896 people had Chinese ancestry (Australian Bureau of Statistics Census data).

16 Table and Beam, 2002 Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) 160 x 406 x 90 cm Goetz Collection, Munich Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing–Lucerne

Introduction

Earlier today Ai Weiwei posted on his blog that in 2008 we have reason to be anxious.

No one cares why there is such poverty. Land is disappearing under our feet.These kinds of days are too short for some people, and too long for others.There are too many failed expectations and too much lost hope.1 This level of cultural anxiety evidenced in Ai Weiwei’s work has a direct association with unprecedented growth and change in Beijing. It is an anxiety that has been growing exponentially across China.

In 2001 I was sitting in a studio in Western Sydney with two renowned Chinese artists and members of the Stars group, Yu Youhan and Li Shan.

We were watching television just days after the planes had ploughed into the twin towers in New York and our conversation was focused on how China and the world would be changed.2 During our long hours in front of the television Yu Youhan reminded us of a lyric in the Chinese national anthem: ‘The Chinese nation has come to a most dangerous moment’. The lyric is more than sixty years old but Yu Youhan felt then that it had more meaning in our contemporary age than at any other time.This dangerous moment is one that Ai Weiwei continues to address almost a decade later by constantly questioning China’s evolving social reality.

Thirty years after opening and reform, people cannot help but ask, what on earth has happened? What has not changed? Who is holding onto what? For what purpose? What kind of future are we walking towards?3 Growth on a different scale is something we experience inWestern Sydney where Campbelltown Arts Centre (CAC) is located.The region is the fastest

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growing in Australia and is home to 1.85 million people. It is a place of endless roads that are never wide enough. Suburban sprawl – strip-mall lighting, new arrivals, two-dollar shops – and continual change characterise the most dynamic communities in the country, ranging from the emerging central African communities to the more established Asian, Pacific and Middle Eastern communities. Built history is not knocked down here as it is in Beijing.

Green fields turn into brick rendered houses that in turn house communities already isolated geographically and socially from their cultural histories.

While new suburbs are built inWestern Sydney, whole suburbs of traditional hutong and siheyuan structures are torn down in Beijing, conquered by an economic agenda that promises both commerce and glory.

In many ways Western Sydney is the future of multicultural Australia.

In geographical terms Australia is a continent but in political terms it is identified as a nation under a European structure of nations. In dealing with contemporary intercultural diversity,Thomas Berghuis suggests we would do well to consider Australia as part of an infinite locale of islands. Such rethinking about the region would allow us to take up new positions that are culturally engaged with our geographic neighbours.4 The cultural repositioning of a country and the development of a post-nation requires cultural remembering.This remembering may be undertaken by recording the streets of Chang’ an Boulevard in Beijing or Queen Street in Campbelltown – the critical issue being that the recording is undertaken.The process of redefining the nation or re-imagining cultural belonging can only begin once the process of forgetting is halted. AiWeiwei’s work forces us to remember the intimate details of our cities.

The changing nature and position of contemporary cities requires the constant rethinking of strategies of international exhibition and cultural exchange to accord with the diversity of social and cultural practices.

Between the dream theatre of the exhibition space and everyday social reality lie the contested spaces of intercultural exchange. Ai Weiwei deals directly with issues crucial for those of us who, as global migrants, have to negotiate changes of identity and re-establishment in different cultures in regions that are layered with both Indigenous and migrant histories.

When the invitation came from Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation to develop a project with Ai Weiwei in Sydney, it presented Campbelltown Arts

Centre with a significant opportunity to present a major survey of Ai Weiwei’s work within communities where it would have a strong resonance. Ours is a multidisciplinary contemporary arts centre, a very young organisation focused on engaging communities with current ideas and issues and merging communities with contemporary practice.The artistic programme presents and supports new models of practice within intercultural contexts.

New models of practice and growing attention to social documentation was evidenced in the curatorial work undertaken by Dr Charles Merewether in developing the extraordinary 2006 Biennale of Sydney, ‘Zones of Contact’, a component of which was presented at Campbelltown Arts Centre. ‘Zones of Contact’ reflected strongly on the narratives of culturally displaced communities that exist on the edge of society.5 Dr Merewether’s construction of this project communicated his commitment to presenting international contemporary practice within communities where the content of the work reflects and engages with the narratives and histories within those communities. ‘Ai Weiwei: Under Construction’ was an opportunity to work again with Dr Merewether within a new exhibition context.

One in three people in the region served by Campbelltown Arts Centre are migrants or refugees. Many have settled here after fleeing violence, political terror and extreme hardship.6 A high number of political refugees living inWestern Sydney have lost their cultural heritage through war and violence. The region is politicised through its migrant histories and comprises communities with a complex social infrastructure and networks; multiple and shifting identities; and states of connection, dissonance, movement and exchange of information. AiWeiwei’s experience as an immigrant in theWest has not only shaped his practice as an artist; it has allowed him to develop an implicit understanding of the potential for change in a new place and the strength of this on a personal level. It is through the re-presentation of cultural histories and the performative reconstruction of new ones that AiWeiwei presents an uncompromising way forward into possible futures.

Today in Beijing there are government slogans on banners in back streets that suggest to residents that they should: ‘Go out less to let foreign guests have broad roads for smooth transportation’. In Qiamen, the trading and artistic heart of Beijing, a homemade sign on the street reads: ‘We will continue to oppose the people who come to demolish until the last

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day’. When Ai Weiwei holds up his middle finger in the series Study of Perspective 1995–2003 he is declaring his unending opposition to the physical manifestations of global power, includingTiananmen Square, the White House and the Reichstag. In the same way he continues to oppose the social and cultural impacts that the Olympics industry is having on his city.

The Olympics is far from the will of the people and the spirit of freedom, a national ceremony without the inspiration of the citizenry, a myth so far away from modern civilisation, the end result will be endless nonsense and a bore.

It is through Ai Weiwei’s continual opposition to government and corporate structures that undermine the integrity of cultural life that he redefines in his own terms the city in which he lives. For those who aren’t part of the system, who have nothing to lose, it is easier to develop new practices. Wherever Ai Weiwei has located his practice he has created a community of his own as a cultural leader.

‘Ai Weiwei: Under Construction’ includes work that covers twenty years of Ai Weiwei’s career from Hanging Man, 1985 to Marble Chair, 2008, the work commissioned by Charles Merewether for Campbelltown Arts Centre.

Ai Weiwei is a producer and maker of fairytales and those indestructible things that communities are built upon.Through his work we have the opportunity to remember.

Lisa Havilah Director Campbelltown Arts Centre

1. http://sina.com.cn, 8 January 2008.

2. Shanghai Star Residency, including Fan Donwang, Li Shan and Yu Youhan, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Casula, Western Sydney, 2001.

3. http://sina.com.cn, op. cit.

4. Thomas J. Berghuis, ‘Islands and the Archipelago: Cultural remembering, community belonging and the infinite locale of the post nation’, News From Islands, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Campbelltown,Western Sydney, 2007.

5. 15th Biennale of Sydney: ‘Zones of Contact’, 8 June – 27 August 2006, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Campbelltown, Western Sydney: including artists Fikret Atay, Cao Fei, Sejila Kameric, Liisa Roberts, Nurit Sharett and Alia Syed.

6. In 2006, 33.1% of people living in Western Sydney were born overseas (Australian Bureau of Statistics).

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Ruins in Reverse Charles Merewether

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1 Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995 Gelatin silver print, triptych 126 x 110 cm each unit Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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Chapter 1 A Fork in the Road

History is always the missing part of the puzzle in everything we do.

I think that they only have a momentary truth, that’s the fragment: those momentary pieces.1 Two years after Ai Weiwei returned to Beijing in 1993 from twelve years in the United States he produced what was to become a key work entitled Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995. A photographic triptych, the three photographs of Ai Weiwei standing against a brick wall are sequenced to show the artist holding an urn, letting it go and allowing it to smash onto the ground in front of him.This was not the first time he had used a Chinese urn or object but, until this point, his artwork had been conceived predominantly within a more strictly defined concept of the readymade and assemblage.

The smashing of the urn on this occasion marked the beginning of a radical conceptual shift in his work.

This essay explores how, through his work, Ai Weiwei raises a series of questions about cultural violence and history; a violence that the artist often re-enacts. In this regard, the work of Ai Weiwei engages with the concept of a country that oscillates between ruin and production, patrimony and erasure – operating, that is, from within the logic of ruins in reverse. His work mirrors the dynamics of an unravelling movement forward by which to critically reflect on China’s cultural history and its relation to itself. More than that, Ai Weiwei has produced a body of work that conceptually posits the price paid for the maintenance of a system hell-bent on self-preservation at whatever cost. From this perspective, the work marks a space of contingency in which the concept of value as to what matters is restaged as a work of art always under construction and yet little more than provisional.

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Ai Weiwei’s familial story is not without significance. He had grown up with his family in a town called Shihezi located in the province of Xinjiang, in the remote region of ChineseTurkestan. His father Ai Qing (pseudonyms Chiang Hai-ch’eng or Jiang Haicheng) had been a modernist writer of considerable note studying in Paris in the early 1930s (1928–32).

After returning from Paris, he married Gao Ying, also a poet. Ai Qing’s poetry became much admired and influenced the development of Xinshi (New Poetry), itself characterised as free verse that took its cue from the great Soviet poet of the 1920s, Vladimir Mayakovsky. However, Ai Qing’s participation in a Marxist study group led to his imprisonment by the Nationalist Government (the Kuomintang). Later, under Mao Zedong in the 1950s, Ai Qing again met with trouble defending his colleague, the writer Ding Ling, against being silenced during what was called an ‘anti-rightist’ campaign. In fact, the campaign was both anti-intellectual and anti-modernist. As a consequence, Ai Qing and his family were sent back to Shihezi for ‘re-education’. Ai Weiwei was one year old. Ai Qing’s poetry was banned from universities and schools. He was prohibited from publishing for twenty years and consigned to a daily life of cleaning toilets.

Almost twenty years later, in 1975, the family returned to Beijing. By 1978 his father was welcomed back as a member of the National People’s Congress, and encouraged to write again. Yet, for Ai Weiwei, the more vivid memory is not being able to move back to their courtyard house as it was occupied by others.They had no rights and in the next five years prior to his leaving the city, his family found themselves moving from time to time, living in other people’s houses in different parts of Beijing.

This story is no more exceptional than many others during the Cultural Revolution but the combination of a literary family, the silencing and humiliation of his father, as much as the experience of the countryside, left an indelible mark on Ai Weiwei and the formation of his practice as an artist.

And, while we may compare the effect of the Cultural Revolution and its

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legacy on the work of other artists, there is constancy in both the conceptual approach and issues that Ai Weiwei addresses and which underscore specific differences between his work and that of others.

In 1978 Ai Weiwei attended classes at the Beijing Film Academy, among the first to be convened after the end of the Cultural Revolution. In a recent interview he remarked of this time being: ‘so cut off from the life we had lived …There was no discussion about the catastrophe which we had just experienced.’2 And yet, in this regard, it was not simply that the period of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution would become a suspended point of discussion, but that a culture of silence persisted as to the forms by which the structure of power inscribed itself seamlessly into the fabric of everyday life.

Ai Weiwei left the academy before completing his studies and in 1979 became a founding member of Stars, a broadly based art collective that included artists, writers and others.3Taking their name from the title of an article written by Mao in the 1930s, ‘A tiny spark can set the steppes ablaze’, their radical enthusiasm identified them, as Martina KoppelYang observes, ‘children of the Cultural Revolution’.The difference was that they were part of the pro-democracy movement, as demonstrated by their protest march on 1 October 1979 (the thirtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China) from the Xidan Democracy Wall to the Peking Municipal Party Committee headquarters. During 1979 and 1980 the group of around twelve members held events and exhibitions.Their first exhibition of work along the iron fences opposite the National Art Gallery and Beihei Park was cancelled after police interference but they quickly gained public support and by the summer of 1980 had been officially registered by the Beijing Artists Association. For the Stars group, art was a way to express individual freedom as much as everyday life and change.

The introduction they wrote in the publication produced at the time of their second exhibition noted:

Comprising mainly self-taught artists, the painting of the Stars group and others was in the style of post-impressionism and the early expressionist work of (among others) Edvard Munch. It was during this time that Ai Weiwei received three books as a gift from a friend and translator of his father’s poetry.They were small monograph studies on Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Vincent Van Gogh and Jasper Johns. However, unconvinced that what he saw in the Johns book had anything to do with art, he threw it away.

Publishing an article on Stars under the title ‘Aims of self-expression’ in the local journal Art Monthly, one of its members, the painter Qu Leilei, wrote: ‘[the] essence of art is the self-expression of the painter’s inner mind’.5 While individual self-expression stood in opposition to the officially sanctioned socialist realism, its belief in the individual and modernity belied a utopian humanism that was not far removed from the principle of ‘modern consciousness’ as formulated at theThird Plenary Session of the XI Central Committee in December 1978.This principle represented part of a larger programme, ‘Four Modernisations’. Soon afterwards, however, conservative sectors within the government began to argue against the liberalisation process as encouraging, once again, the appearance of Western bourgeois taste and values that were seen as antithetical to the spirit of Mao and Chinese communism.

By this time (1983) Stars had virtually dissolved, with several of its members, including Ai Weiwei, leaving for overseas. Following a girlfriend to study at Philadelphia University, Ai Weiwei enrolled in English classes, subsequently transferring to the University of California, Berkeley. After eighteen months he moved to New York where he took up residence with friends in Brooklyn. He remained in New York on a tourist visa until being granted a green card in June 1989 – part of the amnesty that followed the brutal military crackdown of demonstrators in Beijing’sTiananmen Square.

Man has left his footsteps everywhere. No new continent is discovered.Today, our new continent is ourselves. We are embroiled in a fundamental revolution, changeable and fascinating. Without doubt, this is the subject of our art.4

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Chapter 2 Readymade New York

When Ai Weiwei arrived in New York he enrolled at Art Students League and Parsons School of Design where he became a student of Sean Scully.

Ironically, having thrown away the book on Jasper Johns in Beijing, Scully introduced Ai Weiwei again to the work of Johns and the range and significance of his art on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in downtown Soho galleries such as Castelli’s. In these first years, Ai Weiwei also read Andy Warhol’s The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again). One of Ai Weiwei’s first known works was Dollar Bill, 1983, a collage of his portrait at the centre of a one dollar bill with the word VALID inscribed below. Standing as a declaration of his arrival in the United States and validity as an immigrant, Ai Weiwei’s use of the dollar bill (as distinct from using a passport or identity card), also symbolised his insertion into the system, its currency and circulation.This idea would become one of recurrent interest to Ai Weiwei in his exploration of how objects gain value and accrue meaning through their entry into the institutions governing circulation.

While modest in its ambition, Dollar Bill suggests what was to become an abiding interest for Ai Weiwei in the modernist aesthetic practices of assemblage, collage and, in particular, the readymade as formulated by Marcel Duchamp.Through his exposure to both Johns andWarhol, AiWeiwei was led to recognise the pivotal place and influence of Duchamp and how the readymade could disrupt art’s claims over value by assuming the status of art and entering the museum system without depending upon notions of originality or authorship. Hence the history of these aesthetic strategies went to the core of modernism, entailing a practice that sought to distend or disrupt systems through which value is produced and meaning circulates in image form. In 1961 Duchamp wrote, retrospectively: ‘In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a shovel on which I wrote “in advance of a broken arm” …The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with, at the same time, a total absence of good or bad taste … in fact a

2 Hanging Man, 1985 Clothes hanger Dimensions variable Collection of the artist Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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complete anaesthesia.’ He then concludes: ‘Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are “readymade aided” and also works of assemblage.’6 Commenting on the history of the readymade, Catharine Lumby notes that Duchamp: ‘[laid an] endgame trap for his heirs: once the end of value had been pronounced no more radical negations were possible’.7 And yet history also shows alternative routes and sites of artistic practice, whereby the readymade takes on a new livelihood through a specificity inscribed within its material form and its strategic relation to the dominant spheres of art production, circulation and value.8 Ai Weiwei’s response is summed up in what may otherwise appear to be a typical, cryptic remark: After Dada you shouldn’t do anything, it was the end … but … of course I know the end, I know it in advance, and this will come; yet I want to stretch it before the end, I want to have more space in-between.9 During his twelve years in New York, Ai Weiwei made two interlacing bodies of work that on the one hand utilised the form of the readymade or assemblage and on the other were predominantly paintings, mostly ‘portrait’ variations of iconic figures such as Mao, Duchamp and the Mona Lisa. Both approaches were essentially about discovering that anything could be art – and where better to begin than with the master himself, Duchamp. One of Ai Weiwei’s first works was Hanging Man, 1985, made by bending a coat-hanger into the profile of the artist. In so doing he turns the readymade back on itself, signalling the power of the readymade to be transformed from a mundane wire hanger to the disembodied head of a hanging man to that of an elegant silhouette of Duchamp.

Other assemblages of 1985 were made of relatively ordinary, everyday objects: shoes, a wok, a shovel, a house paintbrush and a raincoat. Each was transformed either through its manipulation or the introduction of a second object. After Hanging Man, Ai Weiwei made Violin, with a shovel handle serving as the neck of a violin, and Five Raincoats Holding up a Star – a floorpiece of five raincoats, made in China, configured to represent

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the Chinese five-pointed star. Each assemblage shows a whimsical attitude towards the objects and inventiveness in re-signifying their function or meaning through combinations and word play, as with Hanging Man or Brush with Egg, another piece from the period. As Jonathan Napack concluded in his comments on Ai Weiwei’s art practice, ‘[the] scepticism, reticence and skillful débrouillage of Duchamp’s work are pervasive in Ai Weiwei’s [work]’, while adding, ‘but iconoclasm and critique of history are uniquely his’.10 Yet apropos of this comment, I would suggest that rather than iconoclasm, Ai Weiwei’s approach may be better described as an exploration into the negative potentiality of an object.That is, the potential to create something out of a destructive act, though not necessarily with a view to creating meaning.This becomes a challenge, which, by extension, remains one for those commenting on his work.

By combining objects of low and high culture – mundane, massproduced objects and those that are unique and handcrafted – the utility or use value of each object is rendered practically useless while its original function is symbolically enhanced through its reconfiguration. From this perspective, one may also consider how these mundane objects are given the status of artworks while, as in Violin, there is a reminder of reconnecting objects of cultivation with the materials and labour of ordinary life; of bringing everything back or down to earth. In such terms, the component parts of these artworks do not negate their differences or reduce them to being one and the same. Rather, by holding the two in mutual suspension, the work creates a space between – a space of potentiality.This is the ‘space in-between’ to which Ai Weiwei refers.

Equally, what Ai Weiwei demonstrated then and continues to do so now, is a form of contingency based upon serendipity surrounding the occasion of the work. Hence, while Warhol was a critical influence in shaping his approach, we may also say that the stock-in-trade ideas of the Dada movement – the chance encounter, the found object or objet trouvée, and the notion of metamorphosis or transforming potential of objects – become fundamental to Ai Weiwei’s orientation. For example, from 1986 he produced a series of shoe pieces that seem to have begun with his mother sending him a nice pair of black shoes of the kind used by diplomats.11 However, discovering that they were too small in size, he produced a series

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of shoe pieces and tableaux that utilise the different parts to create a witty if not absurdist play on the function of shoes.This playfulness with the function of the original object is extended to other works of the period such as Safe Sex, 1986. Composed of a raincoat with a condom hanging from its pocket, it was made when consciousness of the growing AIDS epidemic was at its height.

Ai Weiwei is the producer, the assembler, whose intervention follows the logic of the ‘chance encounter’ and deadpan titles.There is no particular artistic skill on display, emphasising rather the material faktura and construction of these industrially produced objects. Pivotal to the work is the question of authorship. As the art historian Rosalind Krauss commented on Duchamp’s readymades, while decentring authorship, they more importantly leapt over questions of: ‘craft, medium and taste … to new questions that were potentially ontological (“what is art?”), epistemological (“how do we know it?”), and institutional (“who determines it?”).’12 While the work explores a potential interchangeability between unique art and mass-produced objects or between objects invested with value and those of mundane everyday utility, what is yet to be exposed is the relation between artistic production and commodity aesthetics.

Between 1985 and 1989 Ai Weiwei also produced, as noted, a second body of work that entailed a succession of paintings and some prints that had as much to do with the process of painting as the actual image.This is seen in the artist’s use of other materials to mimic the order of paintings, such as Untitled (no.1), 1987. Framing a piece of processed wood, the viewer is presented with an image that appears as a virtual landscape achieved through the mere patterning of the wood grain. In such instances – and as will continue throughout his artistic career – Ai Weiwei becomes the master of ceremonies, the producer who makes possible a change in perception and the ways in which value is assigned. Many of these works (some of which appear to be lost) during these years also drew upon images of iconic figures. While strongly informed by Warhol’s engagement with commodity aesthetics through the use of reproductive techniques and multiplication, Ai Weiwei seems equally interested in discovering ways to radically displace as opposed to re-enhance or reinstall the uniqueness of the icon. Where paintings and prints of this period differ is to show the

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referent in profile or outline or as only partially revealed, thereby fetishising the image by virtue of its concealment.This movement away from the iconic structure of images to the indexical is elaborated further through another series of readymades utilising handbags and accessories or pieces of fur as the basis for a suite of sculptures or faux paintings. Redolent of the Surrealist fascination with the structure of the fetish and everyday objects, Ai Weiwei’s recuperation of these commodity items as works of art exposes a latent affinity between art and fashion. Little more than kitsch, they are tasteless at worst, dysfunctional at best, recalling the Dadaist writer Raymond Rossel’s concept of the homophone which, in combining choice with chance and the arbitrary, creates dysfunctional machines.13 Alternatively, the artist seems intent on disrupting a reading of the image by virtue of the painted surface, splashing and dripping paint over it to the point of virtual obscurity. By placing the retinal function of painting under pressure in this manner, Ai Weiwei explores the limits of how both to keep and refer to the image or referent while also diminishing, if not erasing, its iconicity.

The history of modernism contains many incidents of such appropriations and acts of erasure, from the Duchamp readymades to the work of postwar North American artists Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and the 1951 White Paintings of Robert Rauschenberg.The meanings of such acts or gestures and actions are numerous and grounded in the time of the performance and the works from which they are drawn. In each, a form of aesthetic patricide and act of iconoclasm displaces existing conventions, erasing the original work of art and thereby dismantling its authority.

Common to all is the challenge such actions present to the concept of value, authorship and the work of art. It was precisely as Duchamp had proposed, a question of nomination, revealing the structuring of bourgeois art; that is, a structure by which to distinguish its value from the functionality of the commonplace and commodification of everyday life.

Here was a young Chinese artist, living in Brooklyn, and then the Lower East Side, in an environment where painting and the market were in the ascendancy, working as a waiter, a house painter – the kinds of jobs done by anyone living in New York to support themselves while trying to break into the film, theatre or art world. In the 1980s, Ai Weiwei’s works must have

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appeared anachronistic in a market-driven art world seeking to restore the supremacy of painting, banishing conceptual practices from the preeminent position they had enjoyed in the immediate preceding years.

Nevertheless, while arguably the body of work produced by the artist in New York was relatively modest in scope and ambition, it provided a springboard for the development of a conceptually-based practice able to critically engage with the complex and multilayered interplay between the material and cultural history, as much as the contemporary environment, of China.

3 Safe Sex, 1986 Textile, condom, wooden box Edition of 8 155 x 100 x 11 cm Collection of the artist Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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4 Untitled (no.13) Mona Lisa Painting, 1986 Oil on canvas 172 x 142 cm Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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Untitled (no.1), 1987 Wood 100 x 80 cm Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

Untitled, 1989 Screenprint 175 x 270 cm Sigg Collection Switzerland

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Untitled, 1986 Book with shoe 43 x 24 x 16 cm Private Collection Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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Wok with Violin Bow, 1986 Metal, wood 80 x 70 cm Collection Urs Meile, Switzerland Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

Untitled, 1987 Wood, coloured shoes 140 x 80 cm Private Collection Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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Untitled, 1987 Two soles of shoes on a vertical wooden board 140 x 80 cm Collection Garage Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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Chapter 3 Matters of Perspective

In 1993 Ai Weiwei returned to Beijing to see his father who had fallen ill.The artist’s homecoming was to a China that had both changed and remained the same. He had left shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution, during which time the material culture of the past and what had belonged to those labelled the ‘bourgeoisie’ or intelligentsia was looted and destroyed on the grounds that it symbolised the existing order and decadent values of Western culture. As Geremie Barmé remarks in his marvellous essay onYuan Ming Yuan, the approach of the Communist Government may be characterised as the ‘destructive vigour of socialist reconstruction’.14This destruction, guided

by Mao’s adage ‘destroy the old’, ushered in a patricidal movement of utterly laying waste to anything that did not belong to the revolutionary present in the name of the father, the absolute patriarchy of Mao.15 In the wake of the end of the Cultural Revolution and through Mao’s death, China slowly began to open up to the West while at the same time experiencing an internal struggle over the crisis provoked by its immediate legacy and the appropriate steps needed to facilitate change.This struggle is most evident in the wave of government rectification programmes instituted to manage the perceived crisis in the changes made – seen, for instance, in the anti-spiritual campaign launched in the early 1980s.16 During this time an avant-garde emerged which, while developing in radically different conditions, had been influenced, like Ai Weiwei, by the spirit of Dada as much as by other forms of critical modernism – especially conceptual or anti-art practices based on dismantling hegemonic practices and traditions that privileged subjectivity and the artist’s hand.This first generation included such artists as Huang Yong Ping, Xu Bing, Wu Shan Zhuan, Gu Wenda and Qiu Zhijie. In the period from 1984 onwards a proliferation of small groups and events began to appear in different cities across China.These were characterised by iconoclastic gestures or deconstructive forms of critical engagement with issues that challenged the orthodoxies of the dominant artistic trends, both in terms of philosophical

5 Untitled, 1993 Clay sculpture from Song Dynasty (960–1279) in Johnnie Walker Red Label bottle 27 x 6.5 x 6.5 cm Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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approach and forms of practice. While many of the first generation of these artists had left for Europe and the United States by the end of the 1980s, others continued or developed new groups, such as the northern art group, the pool society, red brigade, big-tail elephant group, the new analysts and the Beijing youth painting society. What had changed, of course, was the violent confrontation surrounding the events of 4 June 1989 inTiananmen Square. Whatever cultural optimism there had been was dispersed and, in turn, was displaced by the powerful force of a market-oriented cultural ethos. Deng Xiaoping had ushered in an era of consumerism with his famous tour to South China’s Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in 1992, fuelled by the government’s desire for economic expansion and bringing with it a spirit (if not an aggressive policy) towards establishing a market economy and greater openness to the West. In the realm of art practice, a fledgling scene of galleries and dealers, both local and international, began to emerge in the early 1990s.

The experience of a consumer-driven culture in the United States and a booming art market in New York must have prepared Ai Weiwei, to a certain degree, for what was to come in China. He returned to Beijing to find that the government was no longer concerned about those who ‘worship things foreign or fawn on foreigners’, as the officials had once phrased it. Quite the opposite: it appeared that China was on the road to embrace a Westernstyle commodity culture and market economy. A profound shift had taken place: in order to benefit from Western economies the administration of things had become as important – if not more so – than people.

One of the first pieces Ai Weiwei made in China was Untitled 1993, featuring a Song Dynasty (960–1279) clay sculpture placed in an empty Johnnie Walker Red Label bottle. While evoking the popular Western tradition of placing sailboats in bottles, the artist suggests the capture and commodification of Chinese culture within the confines of a United States-led commodity economy. In a related work, Tang Dynasty Courtesan in Bottle, 1994, he placed a stone courtesan of more than a thousand years old inside an empty Absolut Kurant bottle. Each readymade, he wrote, ‘combines symbols of two of man’s chief intoxications while playing off the opposites of unique artifact and disposable object, painstaking craftwork and mass production, antiquity and modernity’.17 Instead of being exhibited in

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museum vitrines, these rare, precious objects, embodying a certain cultural history within China, are ‘bottled up’ for consumption. Seen together, they are simultaneously continuous with and shift away from Ai Weiwei’s New York style.They also mark the beginning of his ongoing critical engagement with the history of antique Chinese objects, quintessentially defined by clay, ceramic and porcelain artifacts as synonymous with the word ‘china’.

Contrary to the ideological rhetoric of the country’s policy towards the West, China – symbolised by antique objects – had, it seemed, become the object of Western consumption and could therefore displace the blame for its selfdetermined acts of cultural deracination onto the West.

Given such a scenario, the relation to the past and to one’s own history becomes the most significant point of reference in making sense of the ongoing changes in which artists, as with those working in the cultural sphere, found themselves. For many of them, the challenge was how neither to revert to the past nor to continue an aesthetic of patricide or cultural effacement or, for that matter, to create another patrimonial order. Rather, the challenge was how to liberate the cultural sphere from the imposition of ideologically informed values. And yet the question remained: what were the building blocks from which to create something new? to what did one refer and how was the past to be viewed or more precisely be given a different meaning?

Writing about the aesthetic regime, the philosopher Jacques Rancière remarks that the ‘newness of tradition’ means not breaking from tradition – such as the declaration of autonomy by modernity that serves as a symbolic act of patricide – but rather a ‘new regime for relating to the past.’18 He continues: 5

The aesthetic regime of the arts does not contrast the old with the new. It contrasts, more profoundly, two regimes of historicity. It is within the mimetic regime that the old stands in contrast with the new. In the aesthetic regime of art, the future of art, its separation from the present of non-art, incessantly restages the past.19

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Seen within these terms, Ai Weiwei’s work is made up of a series of re-stagings that reflect on what constitutes Chinese cultural history or, more pointedly, China’s relation to itself and who conceives and determines what is its own tradition today.

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Compared to those artists who had lived and worked in China throughout the 1980s, these questions must have been all the more challenging and pressing for AiWeiwei. Moreover, seen in the context of the period when China was urging people to participate in a culture shaped by a consumer-based economy, the overwhelming erasure of an epoch that had ended less than twenty years earlier must have seemed meaningless.What had been the Cultural Revolution’s outcome? Had it paved the way for anything new? And, if not, what kind of path had it paved to retain values of the past? And hence one may ask, on what terms might the revolution be judged: by whom and on what grounds?

Yet it was not simply the new overturning the old but its reincorporation: the Emperor’s New Clothes. Fortuitously, Ai Weiwei resettled in Beijing in time to witness the 100th anniversary celebrations of Mao Zedong’s birth, which, while filled with gestures of redemption, also marked the end of Mao’s final descent from ‘the loftiness of the palace’ into the marketplace of the street. Ai Weiwei captures the essence of this change in a photograph entitled June 1994, referencing the fifth anniversary of theTiananmen Square massacre.The photograph shows his future wife, Lu Qing, lifting her skirt in front of Mao’s portrait inTiananmen Square. Invoking the famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe, Ai Weiwei’s mock ‘tourist’ snapshot pointedly suggests an irreverent association between Mao and sex.The public space or plaza (guangchang) where political power had symbolically resided has been transformed into a shopping plaza, a place where everything is for sale. Mao now gazes benevolently onto the spectacle of embrace between a new form of nationalism and the ethos of consumerism.

Soon afterwards, Ai Weiwei’s playful reference to the iconic personifications of authority was redirected towards architectural monuments often associated with state power or national identity.20 In the photo-series, Study of Perspective, starting in 1995, he places an upright middle finger in the foreground of the frame extended towards the viewer and against the background of various landmarks, notably the White House,Tiananmen Square, the Reichstag and the EiffelTower.21The simple manual gesture – mocking the traditionally used sign to indicate scale – rudely interrupts the iconic authority invested in each site.The ‘perspective’ provided by the finger is no longer simply a formal measure of the subject but marks the individualising gesture of disdain of such symbols.

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6 Tang Dynasty Courtesan in Bottle, 1994 Clay sculpture dating fromTang Dynasty (618–907), glass bottle 23 x 8 cm Private collection Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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June 1994, 1994 Gelatin silver print 121 x 155 cm Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

Study of Perspective – Eiffel Tower, 1999 C-type print, edition of 10 90 x 127 cm Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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Study of Perspective – Tiananmen, 1999 C-type print, edition of 10 90 x 127 cm Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

Study of Perspective – White House, 1999 C-type print, edition of 10 90 x 127 cm Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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Chapter 4 Dropping China

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When AiWeiwei lived in NewYork in the 1980s his artwork was mainly composed of readymades and assemblages. If we compare it with the work he made in China after 1993, we discover a series of actions and objects whose central issue is the value given to objects or works of art.What do we value and why?Who is the author of this value or who authorises it?What exactly are we taking seriously in AiWeiwei’s work: the act or the work itself?The answer to these questions is most clearly defined in two key works he produced within two years of returning to Beijing: Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo, 1994 and Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995.Together they mark the beginning of an ongoing and critical engagement with both the history and material of clay.

The title of the first work accurately and somewhat laconically describes the object as it is: a simple antique urn on which the artist has replicated the Coca-Cola logo in red paint. While recalling the artist’s New York readymades and the formative impact on his work of both Duchamp and 1960s Pop Art (especially that of Warhol), this object is not simply Chinese but is, more importantly, already inscribed with certain cultural if not aesthetic Chinese values. However, whatever value or ‘authenticity’ the urn may have held is almost immediately eradicated by the application of the Coca-Cola logo. Ai Weiwei uses the logo to challenge the distinction between high and low culture and point to their commodity-based affiliation.This relationship is also highlighted formally through the way in which the logo’s cursive script follows the curvature of the vase. Moreover, the work can be read along the lines of Chinese culture possibly having been subsumed by Western commodity-culture, for which the ubiquitous multinational Coca-Cola Company (particularly its significance within China) stands. Invoking through the application of its logo the advertising catchphrase ‘the real thing’, the vase is stripped of its value as little more than a fabrication and reinscribed as authentic by virtue of its branding.

Ai Weiwei followed the 1994 urn with Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995, a photo-triptych that marks a significant shift in his perspective on the role

1 Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995 Detail Gelatin silver print, triptych 126 x 110 cm each unit Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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contemporary art could take in China. Here Ai Weiwei uses photography to document a performative action of himself standing in front of a brick wall: first holding an antique urn, then letting go of it, and finally allowing it to smash onto the ground.Taken individually, each photograph records a particular relation to the urn as a symbol of China’s antiquity. One could say that the first represents the survival of the urn within the present moment, a relic of great symbolic value in regard to embodying the material, aesthetic and cultural history of China.The second photograph is indicative of a gesture of ‘letting go’, not only of the urn but also, symbolically, of history – a gesture enacted by an artist who wants to be perceived as an individual as well as, specifically, a Chinese person. Ai Weiwei’s pose in the third photograph is no different from that of the second, even though the urn is smashing into pieces at his feet.There is no evident surprise on his face, nor is there an expression of shock or dismay. Its ruin is presented as ordinary so that whatever response there may be concerning the urn’s value is left to the spectator.This attitude is also expressed in the understated title and presentation, suggesting a conscious diminishment of the significance given to the action.

Together the 1994 and 1995 urns encapsulate opposing sides of a single conceptual core that has preoccupied the artist for twenty-five years. On the one hand, the 1994 urn, in transforming an antique vessel into a contemporary container re-branded under the sign of a foreign, capitalist logo, raises the question as to its inherent value. And, on the other hand, the 1995 urn negates value as anything but an abstract, autonomous notion. In both cases, value appears as external to the form itself, imposed with little appreciation or recognition of the knowledge and craftsmanship of the materials used in order to produce an object of aesthetic refinement and beauty.

From this perspective, we may conceive of Ai Weiwei’s practice as neither patricidal nor iconoclastic but rather a dialectical inversion of these two forms of violence against the past. He seeks neither an arbitrary destructiveness in overthrowing an aesthetic tradition symbolically enacted in the name of the father nor the ideological erasure of aesthetic conventions. For while there will be instances, such as with the Han Dynasty work, where Ai Weiwei’s practice strongly suggests otherwise, it concerns more marking out the ‘newness of the tradition’.

9 Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo, 1994 Urn, Western Han Dynasty (206 BC – 24 AD), paint 25 x 28 x 28 cm Sigg Collection Switzerland

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Chapter 5 Under the Hammer

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Soon after his return to China Ai Weiwei began visiting antique markets.

He discovered evidence of the extraordinary aesthetic refinement achieved under different dynasties – and that this past was now up for sale at a high value. He also discovered that the market was selling vases whose authenticity was impossible to confirm scientifically.This required a level of expertise equivalent to that of the craftsman who had made the object.

Travelling to Jingdezhen, a region famous for its kilns and the production of imperial porcelain during the dynasty period, Ai Weiwei discovered that such craftsmanship still existed, with artisans capable of producing work of the highest calibre. He conceived of making copies or replicas of porcelain vases from different dynasties, which, in many respects, underscored China’s long tradition of mass production – and hence notions of the copy and authorship that were radically distinct from those of Western traditions.

And yet, in making replicas, Ai Weiwei gave contemporary valence to the work, not simply by provoking a revaluation of the concept of value but, in its transformation, the question of its use and abuse.22 In 1996 Ai Weiwei published two photographs: one showed the artist smashing two antique bowls, the other the subsequent gathering of the pieces. Entitled Breaking of Two Blue-and-White ‘Dragon Bowls’ (From Kangxi Period 1662–1722), it was followed by another pairing of photographs of similar bowls that the artist broke with a hammer.23 It is, in a way, a literal visualisation of the expression ‘going under the hammer’, referring to the auction-house practice of hitting the lectern with a hammer when a sale of a work is confirmed.Two years later, Ai Weiwei produced so-called ‘performance remains’ entitled Dao Guang Blue-and-White Porcelain and Hammer, 1988, in a small vitrine-like frame mimicking a museographic form of presentation. While similar in this regard to the objet trouvée format used by the Surrealists, Ai Weiwei offers a dramatic critique of the archival (museal) logic by which the act of historical effacement is recast as an act of preservation.24 By displaying the hammer alongside the porcelain bowl,

10 Breaking of Two Blue-and-White ‘Dragon’ Bowls, 1996 Blue-and-white ‘dragon’ bowls, Qing Dynasty, Kangxi period (1662–1722) 19 cm diameter Collection of the artist Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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the artist highlights the performative agency of the object’s production.

That is, the treasured fragments of porcelain become evidence of the violent mutuality of patrimonial desire and the patricidal impulse.

While the breaking of the bowls suggests the transmutation of value within the structure of the international art market, the significance is now pointedly turned towards China and its policies, in which acts of destruction and preservation seem to go hand in hand. Even as the Chinese Government can speak of the cultural patrimony of the nation, that is, of ‘national treasures’ and the need for their preservation, it appears oblivious to the widespread looting, devastation and hence ongoing process of cultural deracination.25 Paradoxically, what appears to be an act of iconoclasm is, in fact, Ai Weiwei’s critique of the ideological appropriation of the objects.

At the same time he casts a longer shadow still on the imperial despotism of particular dynasties that made possible some of the highest achievements in the arts and sciences. Seen in such terms, Ai Weiwei’s action provokes consideration of the degree to which such skills and refinement could only be fostered under the authority of a regime that invested this amount of time and labour in the production of such a highly demanding craft.

Ai Weiwei’s gesture doubles the irony of state discourse to expose it as a discourse of power. Rather than seeking the violent overthrow of an aesthetic tradition that symbolically stands in for the past, he proposes an inversion of violence against the past by challenging the ideological construction of aesthetic value. Perhaps the only way of changing the value and meaning of the urns as objects of great beauty is to free us of the values inscribed upon them: to destroy, paint or copy them.They propose the possibility of a coexistence of other regimes of art – as opposed to their appropriation or negation – and the values for which they stand. It is from this vantage point that we see them again and hence, also, can begin to appreciate them differently. By virtue of his actions, Ai Weiwei seeks to liberate our perception of these objects in order that they become visible again.

A Fur Painting, 1998 Mixed media (fur), 32 x 62 cm Sigg Collection Switzerland

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Chapter 6 Principles of Antinomy

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In 1997 Ai Weiwei embarked on a new body of work involving furniture from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). As with Tables at Right Angles, 1998, and the later piece, Table with Two Legs on the Wall with Different Angles, 2004, Ai Weiwei joins two pieces of furniture together to render them dysfunctional.Traditionally, the wood for such pieces had been specially imported from Southeast Asia in appreciation of their qualities of extreme precision in their crafting and design. Rather than performing a process of restoration or an act of destruction, he simply inverts the modernist concept of ‘form follows function’ while maintaining the integrity of the exquisite carpentry and design. Moreover, overturning their practical function transforms these furniture pieces into inoperative but strangely elegant mutations that reintroduce the conceit of ornament and ritual back into the domain of art.26 What appears critical to viewing these works is the point of juncture or the seam that contains the primary form and allows for contact with another form.This place of joining or joint marks the defining border that completes a form while equally marking the space where the grafting of another form can occur.Their reconstruction suggests a generative principle of potentially endless growth as if, in the continuance of the form itself, one begets the other.To this degree the place of joining constitutes a syntax that holds forms, words and phrases together. Nonetheless, this permutation and the variants Ai Weiwei produces are limited, recognising that while the piece may be experienced in different ways depending on one’s point of view, it remains an indivisible whole.27 Insofar as this approach both recalls his early work and anticipates the artist’s engagement with the concept of mapping and the construction of place, the furniture pieces embody an approach of central importance to Ai Weiwei’s practice. As with all the works he produced in China, there is no nostalgia or sentiment attached to the history embedded in the material or objects used. Rather the work is conceived through a concept

13 Concrete, 2000 Beijing, China Courtesy the artist

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of antinomy whereby the interpenetration of forms enables the possibility of difference as much as revealing an otherwise unseen or unrecognised commonality and continuity.

It is during this time that Ai Weiwei begins to develop artwork that engages far more directly with the space around it. This occurs both in an increasing engagement with the exhibiting space to produce installation pieces reliant in their concept on the idea of multiplicity, and in his first architectural projects. The latter includes the design and building of his two-storey residency and studio in 1999 in the village of Caochangdi on the outskirts of Beijing and, in the following year, China Art Archives and Warehouse (CAAW), which he co-founded. Both buildings are simple functional design, which, utilising basic materials of unadorned grey brick, cement and prefabricated planks, take a minimum of time and money to construct.

The earliest outdoor sculptural piece was Concrete, 2000, commissioned by the new Soho district of condominiums in downtown Beijing. Cylindrical in form, the piece remains open at the front, in line with a set of stairs on which it stands and a line of water in which its reflection plays on a negative/ positive reading of the building. Inside, the viewer sees little except the sky whose form takes the shape of a C (as in the material and name of the work) and the stream of water whose sound is heard from within.28 A second piece made at this time, entitled In Between, 2000, was also commissioned by a developer for a new residential building. Constructed from concrete in the form of a Western-style house, Ai Weiwei had it suspended at a tilted angle in a public hallway between the nineteenth and twentieth floors. He remarked of the piece: ‘I wanted to make something they couldn’t take down easily.’29 The third piece of the period was Chandelier, 2002, a 6-metre high chandelier made of crystal commissioned by the first GuangzhouTriennial of Art in 2002. Installed outside the entrance of the Guangdong Museum of Art, Ai Weiwei presented it enclosed by the scaffolding erected for its installation. Unable to be seen independently of the scaffolding, Ai Weiwei exposes the means of production as a central component of the installation – or as that which makes possible the conception of the chandelier. In other words, Ai Weiwei proposes that the creation of value as embodied in the

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chandelier – a symbol of opulence and wealth – is not autonomous but structured through a system of material production. By making visible the scaffolding, he upstages the grandeur of the chandelier as a quintessential object of visibility. On what does it shed light except the scaffolding itself? Moreover, as PhilipTinari points out, the effect is to suggest a ‘gaudy, oversized chandelier of Chinese officialdom … the p.r.c.’s material unconscious.’30 Not able to bear its own weight, an oversized object disproportionate to the means of support, its appearance is anachronistic to the occasion. Or, conversely, by placing the chandelier at the exterior side of the museum, the occasion itself becomes anachronistic to the work it hosts.

Ai Weiwei follows these works with more refined sculptural pieces, returning to his exploration of antimony and interpenetration of forms in a series of wooden constructions made from destroyed temples. For instance, Table and Beam, 2002, composed of a wooden temple beam diagonally inserted into a Qing Dynasty table, becomes a disconcerting reminder of a domestic table occupied, as it were, and made dysfunctional by a beam torn away from its structure.The violent collision of these two elements recalls the fate of temples across China, especially those of southern China, where they are being demolished to make way for real estate development.

Nevertheless, Ai Weiwei’s work creates a single sculptural piece from two elements, generating an autonomous energy from a balanced interaction between grounded matter and the diagonal motion of form.

Untitled, 2005–06, is composed of two wooden beams from a destroyed Qing Dynasty temple that the artist has framed by attaching a metal police chair at either end. While the piece carries with it the suggestion of being caught between these two chairs, as if symbolising the relation between two systems of governance, one religious and the other secular – that is, two different forms of authority or belief – the sculpture also appears as monumentally dysfunctional.The principle of antimony, in other words, no longer functions except through coercion.The material used is nothing but the remains of structures.There is no transformational energy produced through their interaction, suggesting not only the ruin of structures but also the failure of imposed systems.

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Tables at Right Angles, 1998 Tables, Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) 175 x 126 x 174 cm Private Collection, New York Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

Untitled, 2005 – 06 Ironwood from destroyed Qing Dynasty temples, found metal chairs 105 x 504 x 108 cm Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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15 Chandelier, 2002 Glass crystal, lights, metal and scaffolding 530 cm high x 400 cm diameter Installation view, GuangzhouTriennial of Art Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou Private Collection Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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12 Head (Warrior), 2004 Stone 7 pieces, 38 x 47 x 36 cm overall Sigg Collection Switzerland

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Table with Two Legs on the Wall with Different Angles, 2004 Table from Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) 130 x 112 x 100 cm Private Collection Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

Bed, 2004 Ironwood (lignum vitae) from dismantled Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) temple 200 x 600 cm Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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Bench, 2004 Ironwood (lignum vitae) from dismantled Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) temple 400 x 55 cm Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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White Stone Axes, 2006 Stones, colour, 494 units Dimensions variable Leister Collection, Switzerland Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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Ton of Tea, 2006 One ton Pu Er tea fromYunnan province, wooden base 100 x 100 x 100 cm Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

Chapter 7 A Space In-Between

The year 2000 was a key turning point for China as the Shanghai Art Museum transformed its Shanghai Biennale (established in 1996) into China’s first major international art exhibition. The move signalled the government’s new policy of strategic cultural diplomacy, inaugurating the institutional beginning of appropriating the power and value of contemporary art to promote an image of cultural openness and engagement with the West whilst maintaining control over the public sphere and anything seen as adverse to the interests of the administration.

Resisting this trend, some artists have defined themselves in opposition to the institutional appropriation of art.Their need to establish a relative autonomy and control over the conditions of artistic practice and production can be accounted for by the lack of professional institutions in China until recently, as well as the lack of a public sphere independent of the pressures of the state and market in shaping views over matters of value and the legitimisation of artists. For Ai Weiwei, on his return to China, this independence had characterised the formation of Stars just as it had characterised various initiatives to establish alternative networks. In the absence of local support for contemporary art (except a small foreign group of curators and dealers selecting a handful of artists to show abroad), these initiatives provided a much-needed focus, a dialogue and sense of community of shared interests and beliefs.

Soon after his return, many artists, including Ai Weiwei, joined what became known as the East Village (Dongcun). Lying on the eastern margins of the city, the area was semi-rural and rough in its living conditions but the group formed a strong, active community. This included writers, photographers, such as Rong Rong, and performance artists Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming, among others, all of whom produced their own exhibitions and performances. The idea of creating a community persisted with Ai Weiwei, who then joined forces with the curator and writer Feng Boyi and two artists living in New York, Xu Bing

14 In Between, 2000 Beijing, China Courtesy the artist

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and Zeng Xiaojun. Together they produced The Black Cover Book, which included articles on contemporary Chinese artists interspersed with images by and texts on Duchamp, Warhol and Jeff Koons.31 This was followed by The White Cover Book in 1995 and The Grey Cover Book in 1997, the same year in which Ai Weiwei co-founded the China Art Archives and Warehouse to showcase and support experimental art in China.

Later he would form FAKE, an Architectural and Design studio, attached to his own residence, and create a blog site through which to discuss and debate ideas.

On the eve of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, Ai Weiwei again teamed up with Feng Boyi to organise a counter exhibition entitled ‘Fuck Off’ or, toned-down in Chinese, Bu Hezuo Fangshi (An Uncooperative Approach). Held at the artist-run Eastlink Gallery and a warehouse on West Suzhou Creek Road, the exhibition included a diverse group of artists, principally from Beijing.32 Such a selection for a Shanghai event provoked the recurrent comparison between the cities and highlighted their longstanding differences. For while Shanghai served as the nation’s financial centre, bridging the values of communist China and those of the West through its promotion of a commodity-based economy, Beijing stood as the seat of the political establishment and the intellectual engagement of issues within China. In the preface to their exhibition catalogue, Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi attack cultural vulgarisation and compromise with any ‘system of power’.They embrace the need to ‘provoke artists’ responsibility and self-discipline, search for the way in which art lives as “wild-life”’.

For them, this ‘critical stance is basic to art’s existence, and its status of independence, freedom and plurality’. Which artists were included mattered less to Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi than the right of the artists to express themselves freely through their work – a freedom, that is, from both the state and the market.

Ai Weiwei’s contribution to the catalogue also provided insight into how he conceived of his work as an artist in China. He presents his own ‘artist’s statement’, comprising two fictional texts written in the voices of Mao Zedong and Marcel Duchamp respectively.The first, attributed to Mao’s ‘The tasks of the revolutionary culture in the special historic phase’ (1942), reads:

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Those comrades who are firm and determined in today’s ideological struggles and those who have no fear of power and no compromise with vulgarisation will be the hope of tomorrow’s new culture.

The second statement, by Duchamp, reads simply: It’s just my own game. Nothing else.

The texts complement and challenge each other.The first directs itself outwards towards the Chinese people while the second rebounds towards the individual. By ‘quoting’ Mao and Duchamp, Ai Weiwei revives their iconic authority in the present but also disavows adherence to either position. Recalling his subversive portraiture of Mao and Duchamp in New York, these fabricated texts serve as a ‘call and response’ that equally subverts their self-legitimating authority while also offering a means of negotiating more ‘space in-between’ – as he had noted, a space in which to operate between the radical individualism of the West, symbolised by Duchamp, and the radical collectivity of China, symbolised by Mao. Alongside these texts, Ai Weiwei included two recent bodies of artwork showing the dropping of the Han Dynasty clay urn, the Qing furniture pieces and, as the final image, the famous photograph Gold Distribution by Henri Cartier-Bresson, showing a group of Chinese people who, with startled, anxious faces, jostle against one another to hold their places in a queue.

It was taken in Shanghai in 1949, the year the Chinese Communist Party established the People’s Republic of China.

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Chapter 8 The One and the Many

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In 1993 Ai Weiwei had begun to conceive of two works, both of which would be realised seven years later, in 2000: Still Life, 1993–2000, and Whitewash, 1993–2000.

With Still Life, Ai Weiwei selected 3600 stone tools that included axes, chisels and spools dating from the late Stone Age to Shang Dynasty (10,000–1100 BC). In an interview he noted: I used amassed items to mentally reduce the work to one … We are not talking about all the cultural decorations of our present civilisations; here is competition, fighting for life … here is the human being with his animal instincts, and we call him ‘superior’!The shape of these tools is related to hands, body and gestures … it had to be the most suitable for the target; just one hit you know, but it had to be very strong and precise, and this was needed for mankind’s progress.33

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We are reminded of the gesture made by Ai Weiwei in destroying the Kangxi bowls – one precise gesture. And, as with the Han Dynasty urn, it is precisely these gestures that have the force to enable change, whether this is in fighting for life or changing our perspective. In a logic that is essentially counter-intuitive, the artist reorients the way of seeing these objects through amassing them so as to make more evident their discrete differences. What is seen more clearly is that these differences are neither arbitrary nor functionless. Each appears as the result of a series of decisions attuned to specific conditions of a time and place. Even more significantly, through an emphatic gesture of displaying and naming them as Still Life, Ai Weiwei proceeds to show these tools as an embodiment of their makers.

More recently, Ai Weiwei returned to explore yet another dimension of the subject of antique objects, producing a series between 2003 and 2005 of tableaux: Feet (10 Buddha feet, fragments of stone sculpture from Northern

19 Feet, 2003 10 Buddha feet, fragments of stone sculpture from Northern Qi Period (550 BC –­ 577AD) Dimensions variable Leister Collection, Switzerland Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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Qi Period (550 BC –­ 577AD)), 2003, and Hands (12 Buddha hands, Northern Wei-Dynasty, 386–534 AD), 2003, in which he displays on a wooden table and stone or wooden plinths the discarded fragments of statues found in antiquities markets or still extant as evidential remains at sacred sites.

We know well the looting of famous civilisational sites, such as Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and throughout China and the Asian world where, for instance, the heads of the Buddha were sawn off and sold. Without the body and head of the figure the sacred function of these statues is rendered inoperative and their identity reduced to a form of apparent anonymity.

The museological production of Chinese history attests not only to the fetishisation of these objects but also, as part of an overall shift, to the appropriation and secular commodification of culture under the sign of a national patrimony.

Gathering and grouping together these found fragments, Ai Weiwei proceeds to construct a faux museum display. By so doing, the fragments or remnants come alive again and, while gaining a metonymic power as parts of the missing body, equally instill value to the image of the hands and feet.

Mounted on pedestals, Ai Weiwei’s act of salvaging provides a means of seeing the refined beauty of their detailed sculpting and what may be viewed as a tacit recognition of their profound humanness: the manual dexterity of both feet and hands that shape their earthbound destiny.

As an alternative strategy to shifting the point of view of the audience, Whitewash is composed of 132 clay vases dating from the Neolithic Age, painted with brightly coloured industrial paint.The title characteristically presents the work in a deadpan fashion: the works were literally whitewashed. While the idea of whitewashing had been explored within the bounds of a received modernist history aesthetic by Ai Weiwei in his New York paintings, the colloquial meaning of the term is dramatically charged by the shift in the context of its production – China. By naming the artwork Whitewash, he opens up a relay of meanings. Seen in relation to Still Life, the piece can be viewed as making evident the erasure of differentiation, the levelling of the many to one. Whatever difference they may have had has been pushed back or more simply glossed over.They have become meaningless. Similarly, Whitewash, as the colloquial term indicates, refers to the act of covering over or hiding certain facts, evidence

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or errors. But what could be more scandalous than the act of whitewashing these ancient pots?They have, after all, survived only to find themselves subjected to an apparently arbitrary gesture of denial or, conversely, have they survived by force of this denial? What may be proposed is the idea that the cultural and economic investment given such objects provides a cover for the large-scale destruction happening in China. We may be reminded of the complex contemporary history of theThree Gorges Dam – if not more broadly of a time when what appears to matter more is the cultural artifact as opposed to its people.That is, while the material culture is salvaged if only to be sold off, the cultural fabric of a people, their inherited traditions and skills, disappears.

In the object-based installations that followed, such as Coloured Vases, 2003 (ongoing series) or Colour Test, 2006, Ai Weiwei seeks to shift perspective and to make visible what remains invisible. Both the antique vases and fragments of temple structures have been covered in gaudy paint, invoking once again North American painting and, in particular, one of the most aestheticised movements of the postwar period, Colourfield painting.

Cultural heritage, we might say, has been reduced to kitsch. Moreover, by throwing a coat of coloured industrial paint over these pre-existent objects so that they assume a uniformity, we may also see this succession of works, predominantly produced in serial form, as mirroring the practice of mass production of ceramics and, in turn, luxury goods, recalling the early history of modular production of art in China and its impact on the West.This phenomenon has been explored by Lothar Ledderose in his extraordinary book, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art, which shows the demand for luxury goods in the West contributed both to the development of modern industrial production and to Chinese art.34 Ai Weiwei’s works produced since this time appear as a wilful aestheticisation of the most arbitrary objects or actions in the most highly regarded media of porcelain.These include, for example, the series of cresting-wave pieces that recall both traditional Chinese painting of the Song Dynasty and the work of Katsushika Hokusai; petrified streams of urine on which male genitalia is suspended; drips and pools of oil; and the ‘Ruyi’ series.The latter, as with the porcelain waves, invokes a Chinese tradition – that of the humble back-scratcher, transformed

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under different dynasties into an object made from precious materials.

Produced in the Imperial porcelain workshops, these objects were valued for their decorative qualities and symbolism. Meaning ‘as you wish’, the ruyi over time came to stand for longevity, blessing and good fortune. While traditionally shaped in the form of a cloud, heart or mushroom, Ai Weiwei presents them as internal organs.

While Ai Weiwei’s engagement with Chinese material culture could in one sense be seen as a continuation with the notion of the readymade, what makes it wholly different is that the artist introduces the question of the copy into the equation.This question had been prefigured in the paintings of the 1980s but in the context of China, the notion of the copy takes on a very different valence.

Ai Weiwei came back to an environment in China in which the emergence of a market economy signified a transformation of the system of aesthetic production, reproduction and circulation.Traditionally there had been patronage and commissions, masters, studios and workshops, while under communism there had been no concept of private property as everything belonged to the people or to the state as representing the people.

The introduction of the market and of copyright laws implied not simply a shift in the notion of property and ownership but, equally, installing a legal system through which to define the concept of authorship and that of the original and the copy.

The word ‘copy’ in Chinese is adapted from English and is more commonly used to refer to the manufacture or making of something.

The practice of copying was central to the practice of Chinese aesthetic traditions of painting and, under communism, also plays a key role in that one follows the masters with variants, interpretations or misreadings of the originating story or object from which the copy is drawn.This is nowhere better seen than in the painting associated with one of the most famous blue-and-white porcelain guans from the fourteenth century, and Ai Weiwei’s response to this in collaboration with Serge Spitzer, in 2006.35 Going to Jingdezhen where the medieval guan had first been made, they requested 96 copies to be made. Entitled Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain, the two artists requested that none of the jars be either fully painted or include the complete scene as shown in the original. Rather, they

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instructed that only one half of each jar was to be painted with partial views while the other half was to be left blank. Subsequently placed in a grid, the viewer would see either the whole scene or nothing but a collection of unpainted worthless vases.

Following this principle, Ai Weiwei mounted a collaborative exhibition with two artist friends, Ding Yi and Wang Xingwei, at the China Art Archives and Warehouse in 2004. Dedicated to its first director Hans van Dijk, who ‘never stopped looking at things’, the three artists could not have been more different in the character of their work. However, the conceit of the exhibition was that each of the artists produced photographs, paintings or sculptures in the name of the other without disclosing who did what.

In this manner, the concept of the exhibition, as so often throughout the course of Ai Weiwei’s work, raised the question of authorship and, by default, of subjectivity, authenticity and value.That is, the artwork gathers its authority only as an object invested with value through the conventions of art practice – authorship, display and so on. For what if one of these exhibited works was as good as that ascribed to Ai Weiwei or to Ding Yi and Wang Xingwei? Should or would we value it less? Is it purely the signature that matters?

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Whitewash, 1993–2000 132 Neolithic vases, white paint Dimentions variable Sigg Collection Switzerland

Colour Test, 2006 Pieces of Qing Dynasty temples (1644–1911) and paint, 44 pieces Dimensions variable Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

22 Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain 1/3 Serge Spitzer and Ai Weiwei, 2005 Blue-and-white porcelain, 96 vases 27 x 35 cm each Collection Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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21 The Wave, 2005 Porcelain 40 x 40 x 25 cm Leister Collection, Switzerland Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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Ruyi, 2006 Porcelain 77 x 23 x 15 cm Leister Collection, Switzerland Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

Chapter 9 Duration Within Time

In October 2003, Ai Weiwei mounted a video camera in the front seat of a van with a driver, Wu, and two assistants, Liang Ye and Yang Zhichao.

For sixteen days they drove along every road within the Fourth Ring Road of Beijing. Beginning at the Dabeiyao Highway interchange, they travelled 2400 kilometres, ending where they began.The result was some 150 hours of video (Beijing 2003), and 1719 images or video-stills, taken every five minutes, which were printed together as a book entitled Beijing 10/2003, in the dimensions of a single brick (11.1 x 24.3 x 5.9 cm). Accompanied by a text in English and Chinese, it concludes with sixteen maps, each of which corresponds to one of the sixteen days’ filming, and a brief matter-of-fact account of the process and the following description: Beijing: Capital ofThe People’s Republic of China. Political and cultural centre. Located at latitude 39.56°N and longitude 116.20°E. Total area of 16,808 square kilometres. Population approximately 11 million people.

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In describing the subsequently produced video, Beijing 2003, Ai Weiwei makes clear that its conception and structure was not to document the city but rather to ‘materialise our physical life, its condition in the moment …

I always try to find a way to most efficiently capture what I call fragments, or very small pieces which carry the flavour or carry the essential meaning of the city … it’s just one section of a fact – the concrete world …’36 As so often in earlier work, Ai Weiwei’s deadpan approach diminishes the idea of authorial intent in order to suggest a lack of subjectivity, emphasising rather the sheer, brute, factualness of the subject. As he writes in the book: ‘The sum of the entire process became the meaning of the work.’

This project follows the beginning of an extensive series of photographs entitled Provisional Landscape 2002–05, showing locations within the city that have been razed to the ground: a levelling of whatever was there, prior to

23 Beijing 2003, 2003 Digital video, edition of 3 153 hours Collection of the artist Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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what will be there. Nothing is left except the industrial machinery and barren landscape. In one instance, a photograph shows a building from a certain perspective within the landscape; in the next, without moving the point of view from where the photograph was taken, all will have changed. Whatever material history there was disappears in-between the two photographic instants; whatever memory one had is erased. What was it that was there, one asks?The landscape becomes a site, a provisional space in-between.

Existing between past and future, this space is a void both physically and as the motionless time of the present, as Ai Weiwei observes: A void because no one speaks, no one asks the question of who is behind it, how is it that in a communist country when the people supposedly own the land they have no rights over it: it’s a very short moment, but in that moment nobody wants to look.There’s a question mark there, a big, big void.The old is so sad, but the new is also sad. It’s a unique situation, a void with many questions, yet people don’t want to look, or raise these questions.37 26

While Ai Weiwei has always had a camera close by, it is not until recently that photography and subsequently video have assumed a significant role in his oeuvre. What unites it with other earlier work is the concept of duration: from that of a material object in which historical time is embedded to the possibility of opening up and distending the moment through duration. In such terms, the Provisional Landscapes series continues what had become the generative point and defining axis of his work: the contingency of value by means of exploring the transformative potential latent or inherent in the instability of form.This is symbolised by the artwork Souvenir from Beijing, 2002, a series of small, oblong, wooden boxes made from destroyed Qing Dynasty temples, into which Ai Weiwei placed a brick from the demolished courtyard houses of a traditional hutong. Located within Beijing’s Second Ring Road, these houses had made way for commercial property and massive housing development and, later, a further series of ring roads connecting the city around the central axis of the Forbidden City. At first glance, Ai Weiwei’s work appears to function as a simple fragment that evokes a nostalgic relation to the past, a memento and relic symbolising the

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body laid to rest. However, the ambiguity of the title in English suggests an alternative reading. For, unless taken ironically, how can this violation be a gift?To whom is it being given but to one who benefits from the tearing down of these people’s houses? Rather playing upon the temporal meaning of the present, the work is a gift that belongs to the present because the bricks being offered are not simply the remains of the past but, more so, the building blocks for a new work; a new work of art.38 As in other artwork by Ai Weiwei, we return not to the idea of nostalgia for things past but rather that of its meaningless destruction for reasons of profit by those in favour with the state, or the state itself.The bitter historical irony, as the artist points out, is that after 1949 the land was taken from the landowners and given to the people under the control of the state.

Now developers are auctioning the land with the authorisation, if not the complicity, of the state.39 Resonant of Robert Smithson’s concept of ‘ruins in reverse’, this ‘zero panorama … contain(s) all the new construction that would eventually be built …The buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise before they are built.’40 The video work that followed, Chang’ an Boulevard, 2004, was structured by a similar procedure. Learning of a friend’s son coming to Beijing with little to do, Ai Weiwei suggested making a video along the major arterial road Chang’ an Boulevard (The Boulevard of Eternal Peace), which is the axis between the East Sixth Ring Road and West Sixth Ring Road, a distance of 45 kilometres.The plan devised was to record a single frame of one minute’s duration at measured increments of fifty metres.Taking a whole winter to shoot the video, the effect was a document of the life of the Boulevard ranging from a rural village, the business district, the political centre and what proved to be the last days of the Capital Iron Company, once a symbol of socialist industry. As a snapshot of the heterogeneous character of a China composed of different temporalities, communities and aspirations, Ai Weiwei’s traversal of a single road results in a diachronic portrait of the country in which one can view the aspirations and ruins of post-socialism jostling alongside one another.

Chang’ an Boulevard was followed by two more highly formalised videos, Beijing: The Second Ring and Beijing: The Third Ring, both 2005. Each was structured around the bridges over the Ring Roads (the first having thirty-

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three bridges and the second, fifty-five).The videos record each side of the bridge for the duration of one minute while, as Ai Weiwei notes, there was no other intervention except in planning that the first video was to be filmed on cloudy days and the second on sunny days. But what is it that appears by virtue of this process? Ai Weiwei remarks it is simply recording: ‘the condition at the time, it’s very much like a witness passing through: what he would see, his eye, anybody’s eye.There is no artistic or aesthetic value, not much judgment there. It’s a very, very simple situation …41 However, he then adds that the process of filming and editing was predetermined according to a disciplined and ‘strict, rational – even illogical – behaviour’ which ‘works in tandem with the randomness of the subjects’.42 Hence while the method may be claimed to be scientific or rational, it is shaped by behaviour that has little or no relation to its subject, a form of mapping or a grid that fails to impose any order other than its own imprint. Rather, what is revealed is the caesura or disjunctive relation created by the imposition of an order on an otherwise random subject.

In essence, both this series of video works and Beijing 2003 constitute forms of mapping Beijing. Each had been structured according to existing maps whereby the videos or photographs correspond to particular locations.

However, locations themselves are unstable, changing, transitory – a form of ‘non-site’ as Smithson would phrase it.The maps themselves, therefore, are little more than a construct following the course of destruction and construction that is taking place and, at best, provisional in their apparent unity and status as documents.The irony, of course, may also be that Beijing, like other major cities in China, is being rebuilt by migrant labour, non-locals who have neither relations in the city nor rights to live there.

Seen from within this context, Map of China, 2003 (one of the first of an ongoing series) follows suit, mimicking the official map of China that includes the island ofTaiwan. Made of temple beams and pillars, the process took a year, with each different section joined together individually.

There is something unique about its construction, especially if we consider that the coherence of the map is only possible through the planning and process by which a formal unity is accomplished between the specific differences of each component part. Hence, we may say, the achievement of its apparent unity is what provides the map with its symbolic value if

not ideological investment.43 As with the remapping of Beijing, the space in-between located in the levelling of the landscape exposes the imposition of an order made possible by the erasure of differentiation.This reminds us that while such totalising systems succeed in producing a false consciousness, they do so through a process of abstraction that allows for meaningless demolition in the name of rationalisation.

The Beijing videos were shown together with a large sculptural piece called Fragments, 2005, created out of 174 wooden blocks.These included pieces left over from previous work and some beams and pillars of destroyed temples and furniture elements bought from a furniture dealer who had acquired them from Guangdong Province. Ai Weiwei asked his team of carpenters, with whom he has worked for many years, to reassemble the blocks using their traditional skills. With no further directions, they joined the pieces together achieving a technical and aesthetic feat in resolving how they might form a whole. It was only after the fact – and viewed from above – that Ai Weiwei discovered that they had positioned eleven poles to indicate the borders of an imaginary map of China. However, unlike the seamless construction of the Map of China, the craftsmen had created a structure that allowed a degree of chaotic form within.44 Ai Weiwei relates how he was not so interested in the proposed idea of making the structure appear in the form of dragon. And yet the traditional Chinese concept of the dragon as a form of endless permutations without any necessary causal links is perhaps as apt a metaphor for the creative process as the concept of China as a single form. Nonetheless, Ai Weiwei’s assessment amplifies even more sharply his view of China, recounting, in the accompanying catalogue:

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The first thing that comes to mind is ‘Fragments’. Something similar to ‘pieces’, ‘clippings’, or ‘leftovers’ from a body or an event … material, history or memory; it’s something broken or left over, fragmented or useless. ‘Fragments’ is a metaphor not a value judgment of these objects; it’s like deciphering the DNA of an animal from a single hair.The title ‘Fragments’ alludes to a previous condition or to the original situation. We are witnessing dramatic historical movement; you can call it social change, a simultaneous

big transformation that we are all in together. It has a destructive, and at the same time, creative nature.To me, it’s just a changing of forms and a remolding of our lives, our experience, or our behaviour.45 What matters here is that in saying ‘fragments’ of temples are ‘something broken or left over, fragmented or useless’, he is not making a value judgment.The point of view is rather a metaphor for historical change.

And, while this comment recalls the significance of the readymade and assemblages in the conception of his artwork, what such comments make clear is the increasingly decisive move away from authorship towards that of a producer.

Most recently, Ai Weiwei has extended this transformation of fragments into sculptural ensembles through recovering their initial conception in the furniture pieces such as Table and Beam or Table and Pillar, both produced in 2002. Through, 2007–08, commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), Sydney, appears to be conceived as a forest of interlocking forms that embody different social structures or networks: the sacred and secular; the ritual and domestic; the domestic and public; or a household space construction site.These collide and clash in a mise-en-scène symbolising the fate of Chinese material history. In this regard it recalls Fragments, wherein the structure of the work functions as a dynamic interplay between the ruins of destruction (the temple beams) and the systematic construction of a map of China. But, insofar as Through demands that the viewer enters the piece, thereby disallowing it being seen from an ‘outside’, there is no outside, no one commanding point of view or singular unity. It is more chaotic, unconstrained, forcing one to question whether it stands for a construction site or settlement, or alternatively, a wasteland of ruinous debris left behind.

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26 Chang’ an Boulevard, 2004 Digital video, 10 hours, 13 minutes, edition of 5 Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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Beijing: The Second Ring, 2005 Digital video 1 hour, 6 minutes, edition of 5 Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

Beijing: The Third Ring, 2005 Digital video 1 hour, 50 minutes, edition of 5 Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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25 Souvenir from Beijing, 2002 Detail Bricks from dismantled house in hutong, wood from destroyed Qing Dynasty temples, edition of 3, 8 pieces 35.5 x 22.5 x 9.5 cm each Private Collection Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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24 This spread and overleaf Provisional Landscape, 2002–05 Detail C-type print 12 units, 93 x 42 cm each Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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Chapter 10 A Matter of Fact

Ai Weiwei has always given interviews, yet these serve to describe the tactical positioning of the concept and construction of a work rather than the idea of intentionality. Hence in speaking of Fragments, his remarks concern the conceptual basis on which his work is made as it relates to the world around him. Like a sample of DNA, this is how it is.The significance of this position is its apparent neutrality, removing any subjectivity from the spoken word as he does from the process of production of his work. Hence, too, Ai Weiwei’s expression of uncertainty about himself as an artist, allowing as he says somewhat laconically: Every part comes from the original with nothing added.46 In many respects this remark characterises well Ai Weiwei’s approach to architecture and other design projects in which he has been involved, including landscape and interior design. Recognising his own increasing interest and those of others in his design work, Ai Weiwei had by 2003 opened a design studio next to his residence. Employing a number of young architectural and design graduates, he named the studio FAKE – raising the stakes, as in his previous artwork with antique vases and urns, on what terms something may be called authentic or otherwise. Yet, as with his own residence, using reinforced concrete, brick and wood, his approach can be characterised by an economy of style and unadorned simplicity of form as well as a relation to the immediate space around the buildings. In this regard, Ai Weiwei creates a level of equivalence and continuum in terms of the language of form and spaces of transparency (and light) between indoor and outdoor spaces – of courtyards and interconnected passageways or the surrounding landscape. Nothing aspires towards being monumental, out of place with the scale of its immediate environment or with human proportion.

Rather, reflecting the social economy of the village in which he built his residence, Ai Weiwei approaches architectural design as something that

33 ‘Forever’ Bicycles, 2003 Bicycles 275 x 450 cm diameter Installation view, Ai Weiwei’s studio Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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may be defined as conceptually local, guided by the knowledge and skills of craftsmen, the scale of the neighbourhood and value of the community in which it is built.47 Since 1999 Ai Weiwei has designed and seen built some forty public and private projects undertaken all over China.These have included a series of projects in his family hometown of Jinghua, Zhejiang – among them the design of Jinghua Ai Qing Cultural Park (2002) dedicated to his father, the landscape design of the Ai Qing High School (2003), an Architectural Art Garden and Landscape (2004) and Museum for Neolithic Pottery (2007). He has also designed his own restaurant as well as bars and art galleries in Beijing, such as those of Urs Meile and theThree Shadow Photography Art Center, commissioned by Rong Rong and his wife Inri. As with CAAW, the Center is a complex of intertwining nested spaces composed of buildings that include studios, exhibition spaces, a library, archive, and living quarters and restaurant.The façade, where layers of brick create an uneven relief surface, was designed to look like a ruin, perhaps reflecting the trope of ruins that runs through Rong Rong’s own photographic projects.

Ai Weiwei, since 2003, has collaborated with the Swiss architectural firms HFF-Architecture and with Herzog & de Meuron in developing the master plan and architectural design of a Commercial and Cultural Center for Jingdong New District in Zhejiang; the Qingdao branch of the Beijing Film Academy (2005); and the 2008 Olympic stadium. In keeping with his other projects, the notion of ‘nesting’ would seem equally to describe the architectural concept of the stadium – as developed in collaboration with the architects – as the notion of a stadium itself, in which people gather together. Hence, rather than its visual structure or appearance being associated with the term ‘bird’s nest’ (commonly used to described the stadium), it is the philosophical character of the design that provides greater insight into its form.

This body of recent work suggests a shift in Ai Weiwei’s approach towards the concept of agency on the part of the artist and hence the practice of art-making and design. While seeking to make manifest the material and physical condition of things, he also explores their disposition in order to enable both the movement of critique – the folding back as it were on the conditions of its possibility, and the transformational potential

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that it embodies. Arguably then, we may view the various strategies he rehearses through his artwork as mimicking those of the state, whose power is produced through processes of rationalisation and abstraction.

Hence, as a circular assemblage of bicycles, ‘Forever’ Bicycles, 2003 is a meaningless abstraction, a sculpture made possible through emptying out the functionality of its object. By transforming ‘an iconic object of Chinese life into a cog in a giant geometric structure, pointedly abstracting it of any content’, it can also be read as a comment on how people’s lives become an impersonal object of manipulation.48 Playing off the name of the bicycle company ‘Forever’, the bicycle, as symbol of a peasant revolution and socialist utopia, turns out to be going nowhere. It may be forever but, if it is to be called revolution, it is only insofar as the wheel revolves in the perpetual circularity of a fixed movement.

If, as we saw in his video, Chang’ an Boulevard, 2004, the Capital Iron Company stood as a symbol of the ruins of socialist industry, then Ai Weiwei has more recently turned to the failure of Soviet communism as a utopian model embodied in one of the most famous icons of Soviet art, the Monument to the Third International made by VladimirTatlin in 1920. Composed of iron, steel and glass,Tatlin’s Monument was based on square, pyramid and spiralling cylindrical forms which, placed above one another, were designed to house different services for the revolutionary workers’ everyday lives.

Championing the aesthetic principles of Suprematism and Constructivism, Tatlin’s Monument became famous for having made manifest the utopian ideals of communism guided by aesthetic and spiritual principles as embodied by the state.

Produced for an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at theTate Liverpool in 2007, Ai Weiwei’s Fountain of Light, 2007 is, in fact, a somewhat surprising variant ofTatlin’s work. Previously Ai Weiwei had not engaged with the aesthetic conventions associated with Russian Suprematism or Constructivism as it developed in the period between 1915 and 1928.

He followsTatlin’s model with certain significant differences, becoming what he calls a ‘reversed spiral floating chandelier with vertical pillars and spirals’. Seven metres high and installed in a dock, the ‘reflection of the chandelier in water is the positive. It is related to both the earth and sky, screwing out of one and into the other.’49 However, ‘the spiral is a dynamic

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upward motion that ultimately goes nowhere … the form of the Monument defeats the very intellectual ideal it was meant to symbolise: ironically, it becomes a metaphor for the way in which power ultimately collapses in upon itself, for the romantic sentiments with which the rational mind is eternally in conflict always prove to be its undoing.’50This idea is amplified further by giving the work a second title, Working Progress. While sounding like the term ‘work in progress’, the idea of ‘working progress’ suggests at best a tautological conception of progress that begs the question: when is progress, in effect, progress? Or is progress always working towards something that is beyond the terms of its definition, the promise of a future perfect? Perhaps like the promise of socialism, progress is never achieved because its own operational structure – that which is working – turns in on itself ‘screwing out of one and into the other’ and therefore never, in fact, progresses but continues to repeat itself endlessly.The concept therefore of progress endlessly unravels as a meaningless movement, in a sense correspondent to the idea of ‘ruins in reverse’. From this perspective, the concept and elaboration of the work may also be seen as a form of palimpsest for the fabrication if not operational structure of power.

30 Overleaf Yiwu River Dam Project, 2002 Jinhua, China

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Jinhua Ai Qing Cultural Park, 2002 Jinhua, China

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Project at the Jinhua Architectural Art Park, Neolithic Pottery Museum, Jinhua Architectural Art Park, 2007 Jinhua, China Courtesy the artist

Birds Nest Olympic Stadium, 2007 Beijing, China Courtesy the artist and Herzog & de Meuron Photographs: Andri Pol

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34 Fountain of Light, 2007 Glass crystals, lights and metal on wooden base 700 x 529 x 400 cm Left: installation view, Ai Weiwei’s studio, 2007 Right: installation view,Tate Liverpool, UK, 2007

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Chapter 11 Being Chinese

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In thinking through the potentiality of the readymade, Ai Weiwei expands the concept to such a degree that he reinvents it. Fairytale, 2007, specifically made for the art event Documenta XII in 2007, was conceived as three interlocking project phases that extend critical engagement with the idea of China as both a physical construct and a constructed identity. 1001 Chinese people from all over China were chosen in a relatively random manner through an open invitation published on Ai Weiwei’s blog.Their participation in the project involved exploring what it means to be Chinese beyond the physical limits of place.51 The first project phase was the invitation and selection of 1001 Chinese people to travel to Kassel, Germany, free of any costs.This required planning and overseeing at every stage, from the processes of invitation and selection to organising visas and tickets to the construction of temporary living conditions. Ai Weiwei recounts: How to make sure that they have the absolutely correct conditions for travelling and being in this Documenta as viewers and at the same time as part of the work? I see the whole process as the work itself. I see what kind of hopes, what kind of worries, what kind of frustrations … and waiting, and anticipating … then the dream, then imagination, then … maybe surprise.52 For the artist, the project was in fact 1001 projects, insofar as ‘each individual will have his or her own independent experience’.That is, each person would see him- or herself as an individual rather than a collective or undifferentiated part of a mass – a significant concept given the recent past of China. Each participant was asked to fill out ninety-nine questions and was filmed, on occasion, from the preparatory stage through to their return to China. ‘This becomes a very foreign experience in anyone’s personal life.’ Yet, it is not only a foreign-ness in regard to elsewhere but in relation

36 Fairytale – Project for Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany, 2007 Making of Fairytale, Ai Weiwei’s studio, 2007 Courtesy Leister Foundation, Switzerland Erlenmeyer Stiftung, Switzerland Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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to their own country as well: ‘This process made people really realise what it means to be a man or woman as an identity and with a nation: you have to go through a system, and the system can be simple or complicated.’53The work acts out the ‘Chinese-ness’ of Chinese culture by bringing together, outside China, ordinary people from all over China. By virtue of their engagement with a very different world and people, these 1001 people return both the same and changed. Unlike the orientalist concept of inscrutable otherness, this enables a recognition that the Chinese-ness of Chinese people or the difference that is China may also occur through a process of contact and reciprocity as much as that of pure distinction.

The second phase of the project was the installation of 1001 late Ming and Qing Dynasty chairs in clusters across the different exhibition venues.

Able to be moved around and used by the public, the chairs provided an individual and collective place for people to meet. Conceived also as ‘stations for reflection’, the chairs provided an immediate space for the 1001 Chinese visitors, locals from Kassel and visitors from all over the world for dialogue and exchange.

To me the temple itself – you know I’m not religious – means a station where you can think about the past and future, it’s a void space.The selected area – not the material temple itself – tells you that the real physical temple is not there, but constructed through the leftovers of the past.55

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Kassel is a place where people gather, live and disappear on their own paths once the visit is over. I think that past and future, these two realities which are both internal and external to each person, are all integrated in very different forms and possibilities that make each individual unique, with his or her own life, landscape, possibilities …The whole West-East imagination or fear will be under the moon, across the street: they will meet.There is such hype around China.

Well, it is about 1/5 of the whole world’s population.There are a lot of fantasies and concern about this country. I think that now it’s time that all these fantasies about life and art can meet.54 The third phase of the project, Template, was composed of 1001 late Ming and Qing Dynasty wooden window frames and doors, retrieved from demolished houses in ancient townships and villages, especially in Shanxi province in Northern China.The artist recovered these pieces joining together five layers per side to form an open vertical structure with an eightpointed base, creating in its centre the volume of a Chinese traditional temple:

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Built around a void, the structure becomes an empty shell – a void as in the spaces of Provisional Landscapes.The void is the disappearance of the civilisations from which the fragments were taken in the process of China redefining itself. Salvaging the ‘leftovers of the past’ is not about the preservation of relics nor sufficient to construct something self-sustaining.

Whatever meaning they had no longer exists.

Ironically, Template as a structure collapsed under heavy weather conditions some days after its inauguration. Perhaps it was a fitting end, symbolising the fragility of the proposed template and the fate of a form made from fragments that was little more than a void.This is the ‘condition of time’, a condition of temporality that governs everything and therefore offers no guarantee as to what will come afterwards. One can only create the conditions of possibility through the actualisations that reveal the material force of its being.These actualisations are what is given at the time but they contain, nonetheless, a potentiality or virtuality which is yet to be determined.This, then, is the freedom of the work itself – a freedom that ultimately, and most significantly, can only be measured as successful through the participation of the audience themselves.

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Endnotes

In writing this text, I owe much to the generosity of Ai Weiwei and the discussions held with him over the past five years. Portions of the text have been published in ‘Ai Weiwei: Freedom of irreverence’, Art Asia Pacific, no. 53, May–June 2007. Chapter 4, ‘Dropping china’, since revised and edited, was first published in Parkett, no. 81, 2008, reprinted with permission of Parkett Publishers, Zurich/New York.

My essay ‘At the time’, in Ai Weiwei Works 2004–2007, Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne – Beijing, 2008, includes three further chapters from this commissioned publication: chapter 9, ‘Duration within time’; chapter 10, ‘A matter of fact’ and chapter 11, ‘Being Chinese’.

1. Cited in Nataline Colonnello, Fragments, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne; Timezone 8 Ltd, Beijing, 2006, p. 11.

2. Jonathan Napack, ‘Ai Weiwei’, in Charles Merewether (ed.), Ai Weiwei Works: Beijing 1993–2003,Timezone 8 Ltd, Beijing, 2003, p. 41.

3. The following remarks are substantially drawn from Martina Koppel-Yang’s essay, ‘From glittering “Stars” to shining El Dorado or the “Adequate attitude of art would be that with closed eyes and clenched teeth”’, Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 4, no. 4, December 2005, pp. 59–68.

4. ibid., pp. 61–62.

5. Qu Leilei, ‘Aims of self-expression’, Art Monthly (China), no. 3, 1980, unpaginated.

6. By ‘readymade aided’ Duchamp was referring to the title or an additional graphic presentation.

7. See Catharine Lumby, ‘The Eighth Biennale of Sydney’, Tension, no. 21, 1990, p. 18.

8. Perhaps these are to be found outside the Western centres of artistic production or, more properly speaking, outside the centres of modern capitalism where there remain still different forms of production and construction of value has not been entirely circumscribed within an economy of commodity exchange.

9. Ai Weiwei, unpublished interview with Nataline Colonnello, 4/6 July 2003.

10. Napack, op. cit., p. 2.

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11. Interview with author held at Ai Weiwei’s studio, Beijing, August 2007.

12. Rosalind Krauss, in Rosalind Krauss et al, Art Since 1900,Thames & Hudson, London, 2004, p. 31.

13. Krauss, ibid., p. 127.

14. Geremie Barmé, ‘The garden of perfect brightness: A life in ruins’, East Asian History, no. 11, 1996, p. 141.

15. See Dai Jinhua, in Jing Wang & BarlowTani E. (eds), Cinema and Desire, Verso, London, 2002.

16. For a discussion of the impact of this campaign on the cultural sphere, see Charles Merewether, ‘The spectre of being human: Contemporary Chinese art’, Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 2, no. 2, summer 2003, pp. 58–81.

17. Ai Weiwei, notes on his works, in Merewether (ed.), Ai Weiwei Works: Beijing 1993–2003, op. cit., p. 80.

18. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, Continuum, London, 2004, p. 24.

19. ibid., p. 25.

20. While this form of work recalls his earlier New York paintings, it had also been explored by artists within China especially that of Wang Guangyi, Li Shan and Yu Youhan.

21. The series has been more recently continued, broadening its scope to include other forms of monuments and civic buildings.

22. This was pointedly instanced in 1997 when Ai Weiwei painted a Coca-Cola logo on aTang Dynasty vase that was shown at Max Protetch Gallery in New York. It was then shipped back to Beijing with an attached letter stating that it was not authentic but a copy.

23. Blue-and-white Kangxi porcelain was extremely popular among English and American collectors, notably the painter James McNeill Whistler, and later American tycoons, John Pierpont Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. Frick’s Chinese porcelain collection can be seen at The Frick Collection in New York.

24. For a discussion of this see my Introduction in C. Merewether (ed.), The Archive, Whitechapel Gallery, London & MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2006.

25. See Charles Merewether, ‘Looting and empire’, Grand Street, no. 72, fall 2003, pp. 82–94.

26. In a newly commissioned work for Campbelltown Arts Centre, Marble Chair, 2008, Ai Weiwei produces an exact copy of a Song Dynasty wooden chair, but carved from one piece of marble stone.

Yet while it has a unity in both its structure and function, it appears to be more like an ink painting or a scholar’s object in its appearance.

27. The notion of antimony and indivisible whole in Chinese culture is explored in Maria Brewinska’s ‘New zone: Art and capitalism in contemporary China’, in New Zone: Chinese Art,The Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 2003, p. 88.

28. As a Chinese ideogram,Tong sounds in the Chinese word for ‘bucket’ while meaning concrete.

See Nataline Colonnello, ‘Ai Weiwei: Beyond the checkmate’, in Art Asia Pacific, no. 40, spring 2004, pp. 52–58.

29. Ai Weiwei, in Napack, op. cit., p. 42.

30. PhilipTinari, ‘Chairs and visitors,’ in Ai Weiwei: Works 2004–2007, Urs Meile Gallery, Lucerne, 2007.

31. The public security bureau threatened Managing Editor Feng Boyi with its closure. See PhilipTinari, ‘A kind of true living’, Artforum International, summer 2007, p. 457.The three books were published by Red Flag Books, Beijing, as follows: Ai Weiwei, Zeng Xiaojun & Xu Bing, The Black Cover Book (1994); Ai Weiwei & Zeng Xiaojun, The White Cover Book (1995); abd Ai Weiwei & Zeng Xiaojun, The Grey Cover Book (1997).

32. The exhibition included some performance and installation-based work that earned notoriety for its use of animal and body parts.The Shanghai police closed the exhibition early and the media condemned it as an exercise in sensationalism, symptomatic of the moral bankruptcy of contemporary Chinese society.

33. Nataline Colonnello, excerpt from an interview with Ai Weiwei held at his Beijing home on 4 July 2003.

34. This is pointed out by Peter Pakesch in his essay, ‘A bowl of pearls’, in Ai Weiwei 2003–2007, Urs Meile Gallery, Lucerne, 2007; see also Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998. In many respects it is Ledderose to

whom I owe much through the discussions we held on contemporary and ancient Chinese art during his scholar’s residency at the Getty Research Institute.

35. For a full account of the work and the original guan, see PhilipTinari, ‘The leopard and the tiger: Circular narratives in blue and white’, in Waling Boers (ed.), Touching the Stones: China Art Now, Timezone 8 Ltd, 2006, pp. 134–139. It was originally published in English, with a German translation

by Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, on the occasion of the exhibition, ‘Serge Spitzer/Ai Weiwei Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain’, May 2006.The subsequent and recent history of the jar also underscores the degree to which Chinese antiquities have become objects of intense market speculation and competing national and international interests.

36. Ai Weiwei, interview with Adrian Blackwell, 21 June 2006. Published under the title, ‘Fragments, voids, sections and rings’, 5 December 2006. See <http://www.archinect.com/features/article>.

37. ibid.

38. This is not so different from the recycling by local residents of the ruins of the Summer Palace in building their own houses. See Geremie Barmé, ‘The garden of perfect brightness, a life in ruins’, op. cit., 1996, pp. 111–158.

39. Ai Weiwei, interview with Adrian Blackwell, op. cit.

40. Cited by David Spalding in his review of Ai Weiwei’s exhibition at Galerie Urs Meile, Artforum International, September 2006. p. 395.

The notion of ‘ruins in reverse’ comes from Robert Smithson’s lecture ‘Hotel Palenque’ presented to architectural students at the University of Utah in 1972. The lecture was based on a trip made to the Yucatan in Mexico in 1969 where he photographed a hotel that appeared to be in an ambiguous state of both decay and ruination or reconstruction and renovation.

41. Ai Weiwei, interview with Adrian Blackwell, op. cit.

42. ibid.

43. The concept of the map is also elaborated in a series of other works including Bench, 2004; Bed, 2004; and Two Beams, 2004, comprising two long

wooden beams, parts of a single beam cracked in the middle, reproducing the borders ofTibet; and World Map, 2006.

44. As if parodying the official construction of the map,Taiwan is constructed from two stools bound together so that one sits firmly on the ground and the other hovers halfway in the air.

45. Cited in Nataline Colonnello, ‘Fragments dialogue’, op. cit., p. 7.

46. Cited from an interview with the artist in 2003.

See Nataline Colonnello, ‘Ai Weiwei: Beyond the checkmate’, op. cit., p. 53.

47. In the 1980s, the village became the China Albania Friendship Farmers’ village where students were also sent under the ‘re-education’ programme during the Cultural Revolution.. In recent years, it became a dwelling for migrant labour from the countryside unable to afford or obtain permits to live in the city. In recent years, the farmers have rented out much of the land as a form of living.This has led to an increasing presence of the cultural industry. Much to Ai Weiwei’s satisfaction, some new buildings have been built by villagers copying his style, as evident in his own residence and other buildings he designed in the village. For a further discussion of these ideas see Ai Weiwei Beijing: Fake Design in the Village, Berlin, 2007.

48. Napack, op. cit., p. 42.

49. Cited in Karen Smith, ‘Ai Weiwei’, in Simon Groom (ed.), The Real Thing: Contemporary Art in China, Abrams, New York, 2007, p. 39.

50. ibid., pp. 38, 40.

51. Fairytale appears to respond very directly to the three leitmotifs of Documenta XII: ‘Is modernity our antiquity?’, ‘What is bare life?’ and ‘What is to be done?’.

52. Nataline Colonnello, ‘1=1000’ (interview of the author with Ai Weiwei held in his Beijing studio on 3 April 2007), published on Artnet, 10 August 2007.

53. ibid.

54. ibid.

55. ibid.

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35 Fairytale â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Project for Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany, 2007 Fairytale, 2007 1001 Chinese visitors C-type print 100 x 100 cm Courtesy Leister Foundation, Switzerland Erlenmeyer Stiftung, Switzerland Galerie Urs Meile Beijing â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Lucerne 128

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Fairytale – Project for Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany, 2007 Detail C-type print 8 units, 90 x 127 cm each Courtesy Leister Foundation, Switzerland Erlenmeyer Stiftung, Switzerland Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

Fairytale – Project for Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany, 2007 Luggage, 2007 100 of 1001 units, 57 x 36 x 22 cm each Installation view, AedesLand, Berlin Courtesy Leister Foundation, Switzerland Erlenmeyer Stiftung, Switzerland Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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37 Template, 2007 Wooden doors and windows from destroyed Ming and Qing Dynasty houses (1368–1911), wooden base 720 x 1200 x 850 cm before collapsing 422 x 1106 x 875 cm after collapsing Installation view, Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany, 2007 Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

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Fairytale – Film, 2007 Video stills from digital video, 3 hours Courtesy Leister Foundation, Switzerland Erlenmeyer Stiftung, Switzerland Galerie Urs Meile Beijing – Lucerne

Commissions Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Campbelltown Arts Centre

29 Pages 138–141 Through, 2007–08 Iron wood (Tieli wood), Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), tables, parts of beams and pillars from dismantled temples of the Qing Dynasty (1644 –1911) 400 x 800 x 1340 cm Installation view, Ai Weiwei’s studio, Beijing Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney 135

Marble Chair, 2008 Marble 125 x 52 x 50 cm Commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney Courtesy the artist, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Lucerne and Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney

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Ai Weiwei Biography

1957 Born in Beijing, China Lives and works as an independent artist in Beijing

Solo Exhibitions 2008 Ai Weiwei: Under Construction, Inaugural Exhibition, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, NSW, Australia Ai Weiwei: Under Construction, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, NSW, Australia 2007 Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland Travelling Landscapes, Aedes Galerie, Berlin, Germany 2006 Fragments, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne, Beijing, China 2004 Kunsthalle Bern, Berne, Switzerland Caermersklooster, Provinciaal Centrum voor Kunst en Cultur, Gent, Belgium 2003 Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland 1988 Old Shoes – Safe Sex, Art Waves Gallery, New York, USA 1982 Asian Foundation, San Francisco, USA

Group Exhibitions 2007 Fortunate Objects: Selections from the Ella Fontanals Cisneros Collection, CIFO, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, USA Inspired by China: Contemporary Furnituremakers Explore Chinese Traditions, Museum of Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, USA Branded and on Display, Ulrich Museum of Art, Kansas State University, Wichita, USA China Now, Cobra Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Get it louder, SOHO Shangdu, Beijing, China Shooting Back,Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria Something new pussycat?, Klara Wallner Galerie, Berlin, Germany Energies – Synergy, Foundation DE 11 LIJNEN, Oudenburg, Belgium Chinese Video: Chord Changes in the Megalopolis, Morono Kiang Gallery, Los Angeles, USA Mahjong: Chinesische Gegenwartskunst aus der Sammlung Sigg, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany Contemporary Art Exhibition of Kogo Art Space, Hangzhou, China Metamorphosis: The Generation of Transformation in Chinese Contemporary Art, Tampere Art Museum,Tampere, Finland Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves, ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie), Karlsruhe, Germany Art from China: Collection Uli Sigg, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil TheYear of the Golden Pig: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork University College, Cork, Ireland China Welcomes you … Desires, Struggles, New Identities, Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria Forged Realities, Universal Studios, Beijing, China The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

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Second Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art: We are your Future, Art Centre Winzavod, Moscow, Russia Branded and on Display, Kannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA A Continuous Dialogue, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy 2006 Art in Motion, Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Shanghai, Shanghai, China This is Not For You: Sculptural Discourses, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria Detours: Tactical Approaches to Urbanisation in China, Eric Arthur Gallery, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University ofToronto, Toronto, Canada China Now: Faszination einer Weltveränderung, Sammlung Essl, Kunst der Gegenwart, Klosterneuburg/Vienna, Austria Mahjong: Chinesische Gegenwartskunst aus der Sammlung Sigg, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany MoCA Envisage/Entry Gate: Chinese Aesthetics of Heterogeneity, Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Shanghai, Shanghai, China 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, QLD, Australia 15th Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact, Art Gallery of New South Wales and multiple venues, Sydney, NSW, Australia Territorial: Ai Weiwei und Serge Spitzer, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany Altered, Stitched and Gathered, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NewYork, USA China Power Station I, Serpentine Gallery, London, UK Herzog & de Meuron, No 250, Eine Ausstellung, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany Fill in the blanks, China Art Archives and Warehouse, Beijing, China Busan Biennial 2006, Busan Museum of Modern Art, Busan, Korea

Cityscapes: 'Beijing Welcomes You', Ein Stadtmodell von Lu Hao sowie Fotografien von Ai Weiwei, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany A Continuous Dialogue, Galleria Continua, Beijing, China Inspired by China: Contemporary Furnituremakers Explore Chinese Traditions, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, USA Misleading Trails, Schick Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs; Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, USA China Contemporary: Architecture, Art and Visual Culture, Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam,The Netherlands Black and Blue, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, USA Antique Modernity: Breaking Traditions, Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York, USA 2006 Beaufort Outside, Museum of Modern Art, Oostende, Belgium Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, USA Regeneration: Contemporary Chinese Art from China and the US, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, USA 2005 2nd Guangzhou Triennale, Guandong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China Convergence at E116°/N40°, Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing, China A Strange Heaven: Contemporary Chinese Photography,Tennis Palace, Helsinki City Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland Mahjong: Chinesische Gegenwartskunst aus der Sammlung Sigg, Kunstmuseum Bern, Berne, Switzerland 1st Montpellier Biennial of Chinese Contemporary Art, Montpellier, France Cina: Prospettive d’arte contemporanea, Provincia di Milano, Spazio Oberdan, Italy

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China: As Seen by Contemporary Chinese Artists, Provincia di Milano, Spazio Oberdan, Italy Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, USA; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK Herzog & de Meuron: An Exhibition,Tate Modern, London, England Regeneration: Contemporary Chinese Art from China and the US, Arizona State Art Museum, Tempe; University Art Gallery, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, USA No 250, An Exhibition, Beauty and Waste in the Architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI), Rotterdam, The Netherlands Misleading Trails, Altgeld Gallery, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb; University of NorthTexas Art Gallery, Denton; Charlotte and Philip Hanes Art Gallery, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem; Fine Arts Gallery, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA 2004 Silknet, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland Persona3, China Art Archives and Warehouse, Beijing, China Le Printemps de Chine, CRAC ALSAC, Altkirch, France Piss Off, Museum of New Art, Pontiac, USA 9th International Architecture Exhibition, Biennale of Venice, Venice, Italy Misleading Trails, China Art Archives and Warehouse, Beijing, China Regeneration: Contemporary Chinese Art from China and the US, John Paul Slusser Gallery, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg; David Winton Bell Gallery, List Art Center Brown University, Providence, USA On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Photography & Video, Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York, USA

Chinese Object: Dreams & Obsessions, Salvatore Ferragamo Gallery, New York, USA Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, ICP International Center of Photography, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago andThe David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, USA Modern Style in East Asia, BeijingTokyo Projects, Tokyo Gallery, Beijing, China 2003 New Zone: Chinese Art, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland A Strange Heaven: Contemporary Chinese Photography, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic Junction: Chinese Contemporary Architecture of Art, Lianyang Architecture Art Museum, Shanghai, China 2002 China: Tradition und Moderne, Museum Ludwig Galerie Oberhausen, Oberhausen, Germany Art from a Changing World, Ludwig Forum for International Art, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Hoevikodden, Norway 2001 Take Part II, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland Tu Mu: Young Chinese Architecture, Aedes Galerie, Berlin, Germany 2000 Fuck Off, Eastlink Gallery, Shanghai, China Portraits, Figures, Couples and Groups, BizArt, Shanghai, China Our Chinese Friends, ACC Galerie and Galerie der Bauhaus-Universität (in collaboration with Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne), Weimar, Germany 1999 Innovations Part I, China Art Archives and Warehouse, Beijing, China

d’Apertutto, La Biennale di Venezia, 48, Esposizione Internationale d'Arte, Venice, Italy Modern China Art Foundation Collection, Provinciaal Centrum voor Kunst en Cultuur, Caermersklooster, Gent, Belgium Concepts, Colours and Passions, China Art Archives and Warehouse, Beijing, China 1998 Double Kitsch: Painters from China, Max Protetch, New York, USA 1997 A Point of Contact. Korean, Chinese, Japanese Contemporary Art, Daegu Art & Culture Hall, Daegu, Korea

Avant-Garde Chinese Art, Albany University Art Museum, New York, USA 1980 The Stars. Second Exhibition, National Gallery, Beijing, China 1979 The Stars. First Exhibition, Beijing, China Collections Ai Weiwei is represented in several important collections, including the Goetz Collection, Munich; Kent Logan Collection, USA; Saatchi Collection, UK; Sigg Collection, Switzerland; andTate Modern, UK.

1996 Begegnung mit China, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany 1995 Configura 2: Dialog der Kulturen, Angermuseum, Galerie am Fischmarkt, Erfurt, Germany Change: Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition, Goteborg Museum, Goteborg, Sweden 1993 Chinese Contemporary Art: The Stars 15 Years, Tokyo Gallery,Tokyo, Japan 1989 The Stars: Ten Years, Hanart Gallery, Hong Kong The Stars: TenYears, Hanart Gallery,Taipei,Taiwan The Stars: Ten Years, Paris, France 1987 The Star at Harvard: Chinese Dissident Art, Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA 1986 China’s New Expression, Municipal Gallery, New York, USA

145

Selected Bibliography

Books Ai Weiwei (ed.), Ai Weiwei: Beijing 10/2003,Timezone 8 Ltd, Beijing, China, 2005.

Ai Weiwei & Zeng Xiaojun, The Grey Cover Book, Red Flag Books, Beijing, China, 1997.

Ai Weiwei & Zeng Xiaojun, The White Cover Book, Red Flag Books, Beijing, China, 1995.

Ai Weiwei, Zeng Xiaojun & Xu Bing, The Black Cover Book, Red Flag Books, Beijing, China, 1994.

Cavalera, Fabio, Il manager dei bagni pubblici (e altre storie di vita cinese), RCS Libri, S.p.A., Milan, 2007.

Clark, John (ed.), Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium, New Art Media, Hong Kong, 2000.

Dijk, Hans von, Noth, Jochen & Schmidt, Andreas, China Avantgarde, Edition Braus, Heidelberg, Germany, 1993.

Grosenick, Uta & Schübbe, Caspar H. (eds), China Art Book: The 80 most renowned Chinese artists, DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne, Germany, 2007.

Jodidio, Philip (ed.), Architecture in China,Taschen, Cologne, Germany, 2007.

Lu Peng & Yi Dan, A History of Chinese Modern Art 1979–1989, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, Guangxi, China, 1992.

Merewether, Charles (ed.), Ai Weiwei Works: Beijing 1993–2003,Timezone 8 Ltd, Beijing, China, 2003.

Exhibition Catalogues 2008 Merewether, C., Pakesch, P. &Tinari, P., Ai Weiwei Works 2004–2007, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne, 2008.

2007 Ammer, M., ‘Ai Weiwei: Fairytale performance’, in Documenta Kassel 16/06 – 23/09 2007,Taschen, Cologne, Germany, 2007.

Buergel, Roger M. (ed.), Documenta Kassel 16/06 – 23/09 2007,Taschen, Cologne, Germany, 2007.

Colonello, Nataline, ‘Ai Weiwei’, Energies – Synergy, Foundation De Elf Lijnen, Oudenburg, Belgium, 2007.

146

Cram, G. & Zyman, D. (eds), ‘Interview with Ai Weiwei’, in Shooting Back,Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria, 2007.

Feng Boyi, ‘Ai Weiwei’, in China Now, Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, The Netherlands, 2007.

Groom, Simon, ‘The real thing’, in Groom, Simon (ed.), The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China, Abrams, New York, USA, 2007.

Jansen, Gregor, ‘Seismic shifts in “Grand Narratives”,Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves’, in Rhee, Wonil, Weibel, Peter & Jansen, Gregor (eds), Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany, 2007.

Morineau, C., ‘Tradition, expansion, exile: Individual paths in Chinese contemporary art’, in Energies – Synergy, Foundation De Elf Lijnen, Oudenburg, Belgium, 2007.

Niemann, I., ‘The materials of Ai Weiwei’, in Pakesch, P. (ed.), China Welcomes You … Desires, Struggles, New Identities, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, Germany, 2007.

Smith, Karen, ‘Ai Weiwei’, in Groom, Simon (ed.), The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China, Abrams, New York, USA, 2007.

Smith, Karen, ‘art@lastminute.cn’, in Groom, Simon (ed.), The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China, Abrams, New York, USA, 2007.

Wang Jing & Lu Chang’an, ‘Interview with AiWeiwei’, in Pakesch, P. (ed.), China Welcomes You … Desires, Struggles, New Identities,Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, Germany, 2007.

2006 Art Basel Conversations, China: New Opportunities in the Global Art Arena, National Art Museum of China, Art Basel & Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany, 12 September 2006.

Colonnello, Nataline, ‘Fragments dialogue’, in Fragments Beijing 2006: Ai Weiwei, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne &Timezone 8 Ltd, Beijing, China, 2006.

Merewether, Charles (ed.), Zones of Contact: 2006 Biennale of Sydney, Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, 2006.

Neidhöfer, A., ‘Images of reality: Forms of Realism and Expressionism in Chinese contemporary art’, in Gong Mingguang (ed.), Art in Motion, Shanghai Shuhua Publishing House, Shanghai, China, 2006.

Seear, Lynne & Raffel, Suhanya (eds), 5th AsiaPacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, 2006.

Tiffin, Sarah, ‘Ai Weiwei: Refined anarchy’, in Seear, Lynne & Raffel, Suhanya (eds), 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, exhibition catalogue, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, 2006.

Van den Bussche, W., ‘Ai Weiwei’, in 2006 Beaufort, 2e, Triennale d’art contemporain sur mer, Borgerhoff & Lamberigts, Gent, Belgium, 2006.

2005 Ai Weiwei, ‘The multiple predicaments and upturns of Chinese contemporary art’, in Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany, 2005.

Fibicher, B., ‘Ai Weiwei’, in Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany, 2005.

Hou Hanru, Obrist, Hans Ulrich & Guo Xiaoyan, BEYOND: An Extraordinary Space of Experimentation for Modernisation, Second GuangzhouTriennale, Guangdong Museum of Art, Lingnan Fine Arts Publishing House, Guangzhou, China, 2005.

Nedoma, Petr & Chang Tsong-zung, A Strange Heaven: Contemporary Chinese Photography, Helsinki City Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland, 2005.

Palazzoli, D., ‘Cina: Prospettive d’Arte Contemporanea’, Skira Editore, Milano, Italy, 2005.

2004 Lauvergne, C., ‘Renaissance’, in Ai Weiwei, Provinciaal Centrum voor Kunst en Cultuur, Caermersklooster, Gent, Belgium, 2004.

Leanza, B., ‘Interval: From Dabeiyao to Dabeiyao’, in Ai Weiwei, Provinciaal Centrum voor Kunst en Cultuur, Caermersklooster, Gent, Belgium, 2004.

Van der Meiren, J-P., ‘Ai Weiwei’, in Ai Weiwei, Provinciaal Centrum voor Kunst en Cultuur, Caermersklooster, Gent, Belgium, 2004.

Wu Hung & Phillips, Christopher (eds), Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, International Center of Photography, Smart Museum of Art & Steidl, NewYork & Chicago, USA, 2004.

1986 Murray, Michael, Avant-Garde Chinese Art, New York City Gallery, Beijing, China & New York, USA, 1986.

2003 Brewinska, Maria, ‘New zone: Chinese art’, New Zone: Chinese Art, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland, 2003.

Colonnello, Nataline, ‘To stretch the end’ (exhibition text), Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne, 2003.

Merewether, Charles, ‘Changing perspectives’ (interview), in Merewether, Charles (ed.) Ai Weiwei Works: Beijing 1993–2003,Timezone 8 Ltd, Beijing, China, 2003.

Articles and Reviews

2002 Feng Boyi, ‘Ai Weiwei: Ming-style furniture 1999 Installation’, in Wu Hung, Huangsheng & Feng Boyi (eds), The First Guangzhou Triennial – Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990–2000), Guangdong Museum of Art, Art Media Resources Ltd., Guangzhou Chicago, 2002.

2000 Hua Tianxue, Ai Weiwei & Feng Boyi (eds), Fuck Off, Eastlink Gallery, Shanghai, China, 2000.

1999 Clark, John & Dijk, Hans von, Modern Chinese Art Foundation (Inaugural Exhibition), Modern Chinese Art Foundation (MCAF), Provincieraad Oost-Vlaanderen, Gent, Belgium, 1999.

1997 Shin, Yong & Kim, D., A Point of Contact: Korean, Chinese, Japanese Contemporary Art, Daegu Art & Culture Hall, Daegu, Korea, 1997.

1996 Edwards, Folke et al., Förändring/Utvlecking, Göteborgs Konsthall, Sweden, 1996.

Moeller, Peter et al., Configura 2: Dialog der Kulturen, Erfurt, Germany, 1996.

2008 Almanac 2008, ‘Ai Weiwei’, Art Asia Pacific Almanac 2008, no. 3, 2008.

2007 Adam, G., ‘Power 100 2007’, Art Review, no. 16, 16 October 2007, p. 147.

Adam, H., ‘Follies and flussufer: Jinhua Architectural Park 2004–2006’, Archithese, 8 August 2007, p. 40.

Ai Weiwei & Grosenick, Uta, ‘All the arts are the same – and different’ (interview), in China Art Book: The 80 most renowned Chinese artists, DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne, pp. 18–21.

Almanac 2007, ‘Ai Weiwei’, Art Asia Pacific Almanac 2007, no. 2, 2007.

Altorfer, S., ‘LieberTräume als Gemurmel, Documenta XII Kassel. Die Weltkunstausstellung verdient die Bezeichnung ‘global’. Die Show der Unbekannten hat aber einen heimlichen Star’, Berner Rundschau, 15 June 2007, p. 37.

Ansfield, J. & Hewitt, D., ‘Architects on the ramparts of the Chinese design revolution: Draftsmen’s contract’, Newsweek, 13 August 2007, pp. 20–21.

Audédat, M., ‘L’ art c’est aussi du vent’, L’Hebdo, 28 June 2007, p. 8.

Bassets, M., Kassel y el viento creador. El artista chino Ai Weiwei asegura que su escultura ‘Plantilla’ gana en expresividad tras su destrucción accidental’, La Vanguardia, 24 June 2007, p. 49.

Birnie Danzker, Jo-Anne, ‘Documenta XII’, in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, fall 2007, pp. 33–38.

Blume, G., ‘Ich habe einenTraum: Ai Weiwei’, Zeitmagazin, 26 July 2007, pp. 32–34.

Bork, H., ‘Wir bringen unsere eigenen Köche mit’, Tagesanzeiger, April 2007, p. 45.

Chang, Patty, ‘Ai Weiwei’, Contemporary Art & Investment, no. 2, April 2007, pp. 22–23.

147

Coggins, David, ‘AiWeiwei’s humane conceptualism’, Art in America, September 2007, pp. 118–125.

Colonnello, Nataline, ‘Ai Weiwei: Kippe’, Contemporary Art & Investment, no. 1, 2007, pp. 38–39.

Colonnello, Nataline, ‘Fairytale: A dialogue with Ai Weiwei about his project for Documenta XII, Kassel, 2007’, Visual Production Shanghai, no. 3, pp. 114–119.

Colonnello, Nataline, ‘1=1000’. See <http://www.artnet. de/magazine/usa/features/colonnello08-10-07.asp>.

Doswald, C., ‘Künstler haben in China ein viel höheres Prestige als Manager. Documenta-Star AiWeiwei über die Kunst als politische Kraft, seine Arbeit mit Herzog & de Meuron und Geld, das zum Fenster hinaus geworfen wird’, SonntagsZeitung, 25 November 2007, pp. 29–31.

Feng Boyi, ‘Some remarks on Ai Weiwei’, Art Gallery Magazine, Beijing,112/3, 2007, pp. 57–58.

Frilanz, Jennifer, ‘I don’t love art’, 8 June 2007. See <http://www.artnet.de/magazine/features/peus/ peus06-08-07.asp>.

Fu Xiaodong, ‘From the inside of life: About Documenta XII’, Art China, no. 4, 2007, pp. 76–77.

Groom, S. & Smith, K., ‘Yes again, and this time It’s for real: An interview with Simon Groom and Karen Smith’, Nav Haq, in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, summer 2007, pp. 52–54.

Harris, Gareth, ‘Ai Weiwei condemns Beijing Olympics’, The Art Newspaper, no. 183, September 2007, p. 5.

Herold, T., Kassel ein Sommermärchen: 1001 Chinesen in der Mitte Deutschlands. See <http://www.artnet.de/ magazine/features/herold/herold07-20-07.asp>.

Holmes, P., ‘Cultural revelation: Collectors are looking east, curators are scoping out the hot new talents, and Saatchi is learning the lingo’, Time Out, 1 October 2007, pp. 26–27.

Hopfener, Birgit, ‘Kunst aus China auf der Art Basel’, Steigende Nachfrage. See <http://www.artnet. de/magazine/news/hopfener/hopfener06-14-07.asp>.

Hosch, A., ‘China’s Renaissance Man’, Architectural Digest, March 2007, pp. 44–47, 204.

Hu, James & He, Julia, ‘A modern Fairytale concerning one thousand and one men: An Interview with Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei’, Art Gallery Magazine, Beijing, 112/3, 2007, pp. 42–56.

Jocks, H-N., ‘Ai Weiwei’, Das Märchen von 1001 Chinesen, Kunstforum International, August– September 2007, no. 187, pp. 428–443.

Kenny, K. & von Taube, A., ‘Happily ever after?

Will Documenta change 1001 Chinese lives?’, Sleek Magazine, no. 2, 2007, pp. 72–81.

Lau, P., ‘Ein Besuch der Documenta XII, unter Berücksichtigung von Ai Weiwei, Kassels Schlagzeilenproduzent, Nummer eins, Brand eins, no.

8, 2007, pp. 140–141.

Maak, N., ‘Das Geschenk der Wettergötter.

Produktives Scheitern ist ein Grundmotiv dieser documenta’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22 June 2007, p. 33.

Maak, N., ‘Die Documenta 2007 ruft zum grossen Marsch’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, no. 70, 2007, p. 35.

Maerkle, Andrew, ‘In search of the real thing’, Art Asia Pacific, no. 53, May–June 2007, p. 66.

Melvin, S., ‘Framing photos as art in China’, Herald International Tribune, 8 August 2007, p. 20.

Merewether, Charles, ‘Ai Weiwei.The freedom of irreverence’, Art Asia Pacific, no. 53, May–June 2007, pp. 108–111.

Mingels, Guido, ‘Ein Nest für das neue China’, Das Magazin, no. 15, 2007, pp. 24–37.

Mingels, Guido, Pekings Olympiastadion: Vorzeigearchitektur für eine Diktatur und die Frage an deren Schweizer Schöpfer: Darf man das bauen?

Vogelnest und Kuckucksei, Der Tagesspiegel, 19630, 2007, p. 3.

Münter, U., ‘Märchen mal anders’, Die Tageszeitung, 11 June 2007, p. 17.

Neidhart, C., ‘Der Chinesentransporter’, Weltwoche, 22 July 2007, pp. 74–76.

Péus, C., ‘Kunstkaiser’, Architektur und Wohnen, no. 3, 2007, pp. 111–120.

Politi, G. & Bellini, A., ‘Planet China: Ai Weiwei’, Flash Art, January–February 2007, p. 94.

Ruf, B., ‘Kunst ist, was man Kunst nennt.

Nürnberger Nachrichten’, Magazin am Wochenende, no. 231, 2007, p. 3.

Ruiz, C., ‘A Weiwei’s spider’s web for Liverpool’, The Art Newspaper, no. 186, December 2007, p. 3.

148

Schmid, A., ‘Verstellter Blick. Chinesische Kunst auf der Documenta XII’. See <http://www.artnet.de/ magazine/features/schmid/schmid08-20-07.asp>.

Schreiber, A., ‘Keine Kunst ohne Risiko. Warum Starkünster Ai Weiwei 1001 Chinesen zur Documenta nach Kassel holt und was das mit Kultur zu tun hat – ein Experiment mit ungewissem Ausgang’ Handelsblatt, 14 June 2007.

Schwager-Jebbink, J., ‘Enormes Potential für den Kunstmarkt. Nicht zuletzt dank der Initiative von Schweizer Sammlern und Galeristen sind die Werke chinesischer zeitgenössischer Künstler zu den begehrtesten Sammel-und Investitionsobjekten auf dem globalen Kunstmarkt avanciert, Handelszeitung, no. 44, 2007, p. 101.

Siemons, M., ‘Olympische neue Weltordnung’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, no. 236, 2007, p. 44.

Siemons, M., ‘Wir werden viel Spass haben’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, no. 12, 2007, p. 29.

Tinari, Philip, ‘A kind of true living, Artforum International, summer 2007, pp. 453–459.

Tinari, Philip, ‘China power and Chinese power’, Fused Magazine, China Power Station: Part 2 Issue, 2007, pp. 12–13.

Tinari, Philip, ‘Made in China:The status symbol in the West is a work of art from the East’, The New York Times Magazine, 25 February 2007, pp. 72–78.

Tobler, K., ‘Manche hatten nicht mal einen Namen’, Sonntags Zeitung, 27 May 2007, p. 54.

Tung, D., ‘It’s all about Destiny! Isn’t It?’, Art China, no. 4, 2007, pp. 86–87.

Watts, J., ‘Olympic artist attacks China’s pomp and propaganda: Man behind Bird’s Nest Stadium to boycott Games’, The Guardian, 9 August 2007, p. 23.

Welti, A., ‘Der Kaiser von Kassel’, Art Magazine, no. 8, 2007, pp. 40–51.

Widmann, A., ‘Es lebe der Sturm. Der chinesische Künstler Ai Weiwei lobt den Kasseler Wettergott, der sein Documenta-Werk fällte’, Frankfurter Rundschau, no. 142, 2007, p. 35.

Wu Penghui, ‘I am an Ant not bound to any group’, Hiart Magazine, Beijing, no. 013, 2007, pp. 196–197.

Yao, Pauline J., ‘Ai Weiwei’, Contemporary Art & Investment, no. 2, April 2007, pp. 22–23.

Zanoni, F., ‘La retromarcia di Ai Weiwei’, Il Sole 24 Ore, 25 September 2007, p. 20. 2006 Barboza, David & Zhang, Lynn, ‘The clown scholar: Ai Weiwei’, October 2006. See <http://new. artzinechina.com/display_vol_aid180_en.html>.

Colonnello, Nataline, ‘Figments of Fragments’, That’s Beijing, April 2006, pp. 32–35.

Colonnello, Nataline & Huang, S., ‘Fragment: Conversation between Xiao Ling and Ai Weiwei’, Art Today, no. 2, 2006, pp. 174–177.

Duff, S., ‘Capital Comeback.They are two of China’s most influential artists but Ai Weiwei and Zhu Wie are yet to have a solo exhibit in their home city’, Time Out Beijing, no. 19, 2006, pp. 12–13.

Jun Jun, ‘No frontiers – no limits:The artwork of Ai Weiwei’, ARTCO, May 2006, pp. 220–221.

Krueger, J., ‘Ai Weiwei: One of the most influential figures in contemporary Chinese art’, Perspective, October 2006, pp. 122–123.

Krueger, J., ‘Soul reversal: Beijing’s gallery is a brave attempt to be everything its contemporary aren’t; contemporary but respectful of architectural tradition, functional but sacred, and focused completely on art’, Perspective, October 2006, pp. 116–120.

Leanza, B., ‘Ai Weiwei’ (Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing), review, Flash Art, September 2006, p. 127.

Lu Heng-Zhong, ‘An Interview with Ai Weiwei, one of the architects of Jinhua Architecture Park, Zhejiang’, Time + Architecture, no. 1, 2006, pp. 46–65.

Münter, U., ‘Die Kunst der Beschleunigung’, Berliner Zeitung, 3 May 2006, p. 32.

Pollack, B., ‘A bowl of pearls, a ton of tea, and an Olympic Stadium’, Artnews, October 2006, pp. 162–165.

Spalding, David, ‘Ai Weiwei’, Artforum International, September 2006, p. 395.

Smith, Karen, ‘AiWeiwei solo show’ (Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing), review, Time Out Beijing, no. 19, 2006, p. 48.

2005 Yao, Pauline J., ‘Between truth and fiction: Notes on fakes, copies, and authenticity in contemporary Chinese art’, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, summer 2005, pp. 19, 20, 21, 22.

2004 ‘Ai Weiwei’, HandelsZeitung, no. 46, 2003, p. 39.

Colonnello, Nataline, ‘Beyond the checkmate’, Art Asia Pacific, no. 40, spring 2004, pp. 52–58.

Fibicher, B., ‘Ai Weiwei’, Berner Kunstmitteilung, no. 342, 2004, pp. 16–17.

Hart, S., ‘2008 Beijing Olympics: Innovative architecture ready to change the face of an ancient city’, Architectural Records, no. 3, 2004, pp. 100–105.

Pearman, H., ‘Iconoclasm rules: How Herzog & de Meuron work with conceptual artist Ai Weiwei on Beijing’s new Olympic stadium’, 2004. See <http:// hughpearman.com/articles5/weiwei.html> Schindhelm, M., ‘Der gehäutete Volkskörper’, Kulturmagazin Basler Zeitung, 16 October 2004.

Spinelli, C., ‘Mao am Ende. Chinas Künstler beruhigen den Besserwestler mit Sozialistenpop.

Einer aber erweist sich als Schlitzohr: Ai Weiwei’, Die Weltwoche, no. 16, 2004, p. 89.

2003 Chin-Chin Yap, ‘A handful of dust’, in Merewether, Charles (ed.), Ai Weiwei Works: Beijing 1993–2003, Timezone 8 Ltd, Beijing, China, 2003.

Chin-Chin Yap, ‘Conversations: Ai Weiwei with Chin-Chin Yap’, in Merewether, Charles (ed.), Ai Weiwei Works: Beijing 1993–2003, Timezone 8 Ltd, Beijing, China, 2003.

Lewis, A., ‘China Now’, South China Morning Post, 3 March 2003, p. 6.

Merewether, Charles, ‘Changing perspectives’ (interview), in Merewether, Charles (ed.), Ai Weiwei Works: Beijing 1993–2003,Timezone 8 Ltd, Beijing, China, 2003.

Napack, Jonathan, ‘Ai Weiwei’, in Merewether, Charles (ed.), Ai Weiwei Works: Beijing 1993–2003, Timezone 8 Ltd, Beijing, China, 2003.

1999 Chinese Type, E-Mail Mag, Hard Copy, 2 (6), 1999, pp. 50, 96.

Chinese Type, E-Mail Mag, Hard Copy, 2 (4), 1999, pp. 3, 13, 18.

Jiangsu Art Monthly, no. 9, 1999, p. 9.

1998 Chinese Type, E-Mail Mag, Hard Copy, 1 (6), 1998, pp. 7–10.

1997 Chinese Oil Painting and Sculptures, auction catalogue, China Guardian, Beijing, 1997 Hualang, Art Periodical, 1995, pp. 5–6.

Chinese Type, E-Mail Mag, Hard Copy, 1 (1), 1997, p. 12.

Lincot, Emmaneul, Avant-Gardes, Beijing, 1997.

1994 Ubu Roi Art Research Committee, 1994 URARC Report, Beijing, 1994. <http://www. archivesandwarehouse.com/Gallery/CAAW/html/ caaw_history99.htm> Tokyo Gallery, ‘15’, 1994.

1987 The Annual of Chinese United Overseas Artists Association, New York, 1987, p. 43.

1980 Gao Yan, Fine Arts Monthly, no. 12, 1980, p. 35.

2000 Bernell, Robert, Ai Weiwei with Robert Bernell (Interview), in Clark, J., (ed.), Chinese Art at the End of the Millenium, New Art Media, Hong Kong, 2000, pp. 176–181.

Kunz, Sabine, ‘Aufbruch in China’, Art, no. 5, 2000, p. 30.

149

List of Works

Campbelltown Arts Centre Hanging Man, 1985, clothes hanger, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Safe Sex, 1986, textile, condom, wooden box, edition of 8, 155 x 100 x 11 cm. Collection of the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Untitled, 1986, book with shoe, 43 x 24 x 16 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Wok with Violin Bow, 1986, metal, wood, 80 x 70 cm.

Collection Urs Meile, Switzerland. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Untitled (no. 13) Mona Lisa Painting, 1986, oil on canvas, 172 x 142 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Untitled (no. 18) Mona Lisa Painting, 1986, oil on canvas, 173 x 142.5 cm. Collection Urs Meile. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Untitled, 1987, wood, coloured shoes, 140 x 80 cm.

Private Collection. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Untitled, 1987, two soles of shoes on a vertical wooden board, 140 x 80 cm. Collection Garage.

Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Untitled (no.1), 1987, wood, 100 x 80 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Untitled, 1989, screenprint, 175 x 270 cm. Sigg Collection, Switzerland [Not included in the exhibition] Untitled, 1993, clay sculpture from Song Dynasty (960–1279) in Johnnie Walker Red Label bottle, 27 x 6.5 x 6.5 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Whitewash, 1993–2000, 132 Neolithic vases, white paint dimensions variable. Sigg Collection, Switzerland [Not included in the exhibition] Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo, 1994, urn, Western Han Dynasty (206 BC–24 AD), paint, 25 x 28 x 28 cm. Sigg Collection, Switzerland [Not included in the exhibition] June 1994, 1994, gelatin silver print, 121 x 155 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne

150

Tang Dynasty Courtesan in Bottle, 1994, clay sculpture dating fromTang Dynasty (618–907), glass bottle, 23 x 8 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995, gelatin silver print, triptych, 126 x 110 cm each unit. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Breaking of Two Blue-and-White ‘Dragon’ Bowls, 1996, blue-and-white ‘dragon’ bowls, Qing Dynasty, Kangxi period (1662–1722), 19 cm diameter. Collection of the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne A Fur Painting, 1998, mixed media (fur), 32 x 62 cm.

Sigg Collection, Switzerland Tables at Right Angles, 1998, tables, Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), 175 x 126 x 174 cm. Private Collection, New York. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Study of Perspective ­– Eiffel Tower, 1999, C-type print, edition of 10, 90 x 127 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Study of Perspective –Tiananmen, 1999, C-type print, edition of 10, 90 x 127 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Study of Perspective – White House, 1999, C-type print, edition of 10, 90 x 127 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Concrete, 2000, C-type print, 127 x 90 cm. Courtesy the artist [See page 66] In Between, 2000, C-type print, 90 x 127 cm. Courtesy the artist [See page 80] Chandelier, 2002, glass crystal, lights, metal and scaffolding, 530 cm high x 400 cm diameter, installation view, GuangzhouTriennial of Art, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou. Private Collection. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne [Not included in the exhibition] Feet, 2002, 10 Buddha feet, fragments of stone sculpture from Northern Qi Period (550 BC­–577AD), dimensions variable. Leister Collection, Switzerland.

Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Souvenir from Beijing, 2002, bricks from dismantled house in hutong, wood from destroyed Qing Dynasty temples, edition of 3, 8 pieces, 35.5 x 22.5 x 9.5 cm each. Private Collection. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne

Table and Beam, 2002, table and beam, Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), 160 x 406 x 90 cm. Goetz Collection, Munich. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne [Not included in the exhibition] Provisional Landscape, 2002–05 (detail), C-type print, 12 units, 93 x 42 cm each. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Beijing 2003, 2003, digital video, edition of 3, 153 hours. Collection of the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne ‘Forever’ Bicycles, 2003, bicycles, 275 x 450 cm diameter, installation view, Ai Weiwei’s studio, Beijing. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne [Not included in the exhibition] Bed, 2004, ironwood (lignum vitae) from dismantled Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) temple, 200 x 600 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Bench, 2004, ironwood (lignum vitae) from dismantled Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) temple, 400 x 55 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Chang’ an Boulevard, 2004, digital video, 10 hours, 13 minutes, edition of 5. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Head (Warrior), 2004, stone, 7 pieces, 38 x 47 x 36 cm overall. Sigg Collection, Switzerland Table with Two Legs on the Wall with Different Angles, 2004, table from Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), 130 x 112 x 100 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Beijing: The Second Ring, 2005, digital video, 1 hour, 6 minutes, edition of 5 . Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Beijing: The Third Ring, 2005, digital video, 1 hour, 50 minutes, edition of 5. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne The Wave, 2005, porcelain, 40 x 40 x 25 cm. Leister Collection, Switzerland. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain 1/3, Serge Spitzer and Ai Weiwei, 2005, blue-and-white porcelain, 96 vases, 27 x 35 cm each. Collection Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne [Not included in the exhibition]

Untitled, 2005–06, ironwood from destroyed Qing Dynasty temples, found metal chairs, 105 x 504 x 108 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Coca-Cola, 2006, vase from the Neolithic Age (5000–3000 BC), paint, 45.4 x 36 x 36 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Colour Test, 2006, pieces of Qing Dynasty temples (1644–1911) and paint, 44 pieces, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Ruyi, 2006, porcelain, 77 x 23 x 15 cm. Leister Collection, Switzerland. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Ton of Tea, 2006, one ton Pu Er tea from Yunnan province, wooden base, 100 x 100 x 100 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne White Stone Axes, 2006, stones, colour, 494 units, dimensions variable. Leister Collection, Switzerland.

Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne ‘6.3.2006’, 2007, C-type print, 24 units, 29.7 x 42 cm each.

Courtesy the artist and Herzog & de Meuron Birds Nest Olympic Stadium, 2007, Beijing, China. Courtesy the artist and Herzog & de Meuron.

Photographs: Andri Pol [Not included in the exhibition] Fountain of Light, 2007, glass crystals, lights and metal on a wooden base, 700 x 529 x 400 cm, left: installation view, Ai Weiwei’s studio, Beijing, 2007, right: installation view,Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK, 2007 [Not included in the exhibition] Fountain of Light,Tate Liverpool, 2007, C-type print, 127 x 90 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne [See pages 122,123] Fairytale, 2007, 1001 Chinese visitors, C-type print, 100 x 100 cm. Courtesy Leister Foundation, Switzerland; Erlenmeyer Stiftung, Switzerland; Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne [Not included in the exhibition] Fairytale – Project for Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany, 2007, C-type print, 8 units, 90 x 127 cm each. Courtesy Leister Foundation, Switzerland; Erlenmeyer Stiftung, Switzerland; Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne

Fairytale – Project for Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany, 2007, Luggage, 2007, 100 of 1001 units, 57 x 36 x 22 cm each, installation view, , AedesLand, Berlin. Courtesy Leister Foundation, Switzerland, Erlenmeyer Stiftung, Switzerland; Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Fairytale – Project for Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany, 2007, Making of Fairytale, Ai Weiwei’s studio, 2007, C-type print, 90 x 127 cm. Courtesy Leister Foundation, Switzerland; Erlenmeyer Stiftung, Switzerland; Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne [See page 124] Fairytale – Film, 2007, digital video, 3 hours. Courtesy Leister Foundation, Switzerland, Erlenmeyer Stiftung, Switzerland; Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Template, 2007, wooden doors and windows from destroyed Ming and Qing Dynasty houses (1368­­–1911), wooden base, 720 x 1200 x 850 cm before collapsing, 422 x 1106 x 875 cm after collapsing, installation view, Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany, 2007. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne [Not included in the exhibition] Project at the Jinhua Architectural Art Park, Neolithic Pottery Museum, Jinhua Architectural Art Park, 2007, Jinhua, China, C-type print, 127 x 90 cm. Courtesy the artist [See page 120] Marble Chair, 2008, marble, 125 x 52 x 50 cm.

Commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney.

Courtesy the artist, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne and Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Fairytale – Film, 2007, digital video, 3 hours. Courtesy Leister Foundation, Switzerland, Erlenmeyer Stiftung, Switzerland; Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne Through, 2007–08, Iron wood (Tieli wood), Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), tables, parts of beams and pillars from dismantled temples of the Qing Dynasty (1644 –1911), 400 x 800 x 1340 cm. Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney

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Contributors

Acknowledgements

Dr Gene Sherman

Lisa Havilah

Dr Charles Merewether

Dr Gene Sherman is Chair and Executive Director of Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF). She has a specialised knowledge of art, literary theory and French and English literature and spent seventeen years teaching, researching and lecturing at secondary and tertiary levels. As Director of Sherman Galleries (1986–2007) she initiated, negotiated and organised twelve to seventeen exhibitions annually, as well as regional and national touring exhibitions within Australia, and international touring exhibitions through the Asia-Pacific region. Gene and Brian Sherman sponsor a Master of Arts Administration student at the College of Fine Arts,The University of New South Wales, a studio at Bundanon and a contemporary Australian art-research room at the Schaeffer Fine Arts Library,The University of Sydney.

Dr Sherman’s Board appointments have included trusteeships with the BundanonTrust (1995–2002), the Powerhouse Museum (Science + Design) (1995–2001) and Deputy Chair of the Power Institute Council at The University of Sydney (1996–2006). Currently she is on the Board of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation; the Venice Biennale Commissioner’s Council; the Art & Australia Advisory Board (from 2008); and the Australia-Israel Cultural Exchange (AICE). In 2003, the French Government honoured Dr Sherman with the award of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her contribution to culture. In 2008 she received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters fromThe University of Sydney.

Lisa Havilah is the Director of Campbelltown Arts Centre. Previously she was the Assistant Director of Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre and Liverpool Regional Museum (1998–2004). She was the Inaugural Co-Director of Project Contemporary Art Space, Wollongong (1995–1998). Lisa Havilah has developed and managed a range of national and international exchange, exhibition and residency programmes.

Curatorial projects include Shanghai Star (2002); Anita & Beyond (2003); For Matthew & Others: Journeys with Schizophrenia (2006); and Yours, Mine and Ours, 50 Years of ABC TV (2006). She specialises in the intersection between contemporary art and issues within communities and the engagement of each with the other. She has directed multidisciplinary contemporary arts programmes including C’Town Bling (2005), News from Islands (2007) and Sunshine State: Smart State (2007). Projects in development include 1.85 million, which will examine contemporary communities on the edge of major international cities, and a programme of commissions from artists across the Pacific. She has lectured in Management and Organisation (Master of Fine Arts) at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. She is the Chair of the Western Sydney Committee and a member of the Visual Arts & Craft Committee for Arts NSW.

Dr Charles Merewether is Deputy Director of the Cultural District (Tourist Development & Investment Co.) in Abu Dhabi and recently Arts and Culture Consultant for the Emirates Foundation in the UAE. Between 2004 and 2007 he was Artistic Director and Curator of the 2006 Biennale of Sydney and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University, Canberra.

Born in Scotland and educated in Australia, he received his Bachelor’s Degree in Literature and Doctorate in Art History atThe University of Sydney.

Since then he has been Collections Curator at the Getty Center in Los Angeles (1994–2004) and has taught atThe University of Sydney, Universidad Autonoma in Barcelona, the Ibero-Americana in Mexico City andThe University of Southern California, and been recipient of various Fellowships including at Yale University and in Japan. He has published widely on modernism and contemporary art. His most recent publications include Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950–1970 (The Getty Center, Los Angeles, 2007); General and Commissioning Editor, Zones of Contact: 2006 Biennale of Sydney (Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, 2006); Editor, The Archive (M.I.T. Press, Mass. & Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2006); and Editor, Ai Weiwei Works: Beijng 1993–2003 (Timezone 8 Ltd, Beijing, 2003). He is currently writing a book on the cultural history of looting, and another on postwar photography in Japan.

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Charles Merewether would like to thank most especially Ai Weiwei for his support throughout the process of the exhibition and this publication. His contribution to all stages of their development has been invaluable in reflecting the central conceptual core and principles of his artistic practice. I should also like to thank his assistants Gao Yuan and Nadine Stenke for their constant attentiveness to all manner of issues and details that have demanded considerable time and attention, facilitating communication between Ai Weiwei and the exhibition and publication teams.

Equally Urs Meile and his staff at Galerie Urs Meile in Lucerne and Beijing, most especially Karin Seiz and Nataline Colonnello, have dedicated a tremendous amount of their time and effort to ensuring the success of this project by managing and overseeing the loan of all the work, providing images and information, and offering fact-checking. All this demonstrates the way an art gallery can play a vital role in the contemporary art scene and critical support to the practice of artists. In this regard too I would like to thank all the collectors who have generously lent works, therefore contributing to what is one of the first major review exhibitions of the artist’s work.

Finally, I wish to thank the teams in Australia who have devoted their energies to making this project happen at the highest degree of excellence – and at distance from myself and from Ai Weiwei.These include Dr Gene Sherman, Laura Murray Cree and

the staff of Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, together with Lisa Havilah and staff at Campbelltown Arts Centre. Great credit should go to Mark Gowing for producing a catalogue that captures the spirit of Ai Weiwei’s work and stands alone as a beautiful catalogue of which we are proud.

Dr Gene Sherman and Lisa Havilah would like to warmly thank Ai Weiwei for his generosity and for the extraordinary support he has given to their institutions’ respective and concurrent Sydney-based projects.

Sincere thanks must also go to the following individuals and institutions for their guidance, expertise and assistance, without which this catalogue and the related exhibitions could not have been realised: Simeon Kronenberg, for the role he played in the early development of this exhibition; Danielle Earp (Associate Director, SCAF); Amanda Henry (General Manager, SCAF); Barry Sechos (Sherman Group); Nadine Stenke and Gao Yuan (Assistants to Ai Weiwei, Beijing); Karin Seiz and Enrico Polato (Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing); Elspeth Menzies (University of New South Wales Press); Robert Bernell (Timezone 8 Ltd); Amanda Langton, (Operations Manager, CAC); Georgia Close (Education & Public Programmes, CAC); Danae Natsis (Programme Support, CAC); Jos Jensen and Ian Wingrove (Rhodes Wingrove); Lindy Deitz (Director of Community Services, Campbelltown

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City Council); and PaulTosi (General Manager, Campbelltown City Council).

Thanks go to the generous lenders who have been supportive of this project: Collection Garage; Erlenmeyer Stiftung, Switzerland; Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne; Dr P. & M. Hahnloser; Jason Lee; Leister Collection, Switzerland; Leister Foundation, Switzerland; Bob & Nancy Magoon; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Sigg Collection; Margaret and Alex H. Weber-Chan.

Brian Sherman’s unconditional support has underpinned SCAF’s coming of age and this project in particular – and special thanks are due to Edmund Capon AM, OBE, Director, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Charlotte Davy, Senior Exhibitions Registrar, Art Gallery of New South Wales, for their guidance as well as the timely and thoughtful assistance offered in a moment of need.

We are deeply indebted to Laura Murray Cree (Publications Manager, SCAF, and catalogue editor), who has brought her inimitable experience to the task; to Claire Armstrong, for proofreading; to Kate Lyons-Dawson, for indexing; to Mark Gowing, for his eloquent and authoritative design; and finally, and most importantly, to catalogue author and exhibition curator Dr Charles Merewether, whose contribution to this publication adds depth and weight to contemporary art scholarship and to the growing body of interpretive text on the significant work of Ai Weiwei.

Index

Page numbers in italic type refer to images aesthetic regime, 51 Ah Xian, 14 AIDS, 36 Ai Qing, 13, 29, 114 Ai Qing High School, Jinghua (2003), 114 Ai Weiwei. see also assemblage materials; critical engagements; influences; work in Beijing 1975–82, 29–31 in Beijing from 1993, 28, 49, 50–2, 59, 81 education, 29, 31, 33 family history, 29 in New York, 33, 34–6, 37–8 in Sydney, 11, 21 antimony, 67–8, 69 Architectural Art Garden and Landscape, Jinghua (2004), 114 Art Monthly (Beijing) (journal), 31 Art Students League, New York, 33 Asia-PacificTriennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 12 assemblage materials antique pottery and sculpture, 50–1, 59–60, 63–4, 86–8 bicycles, 115 Buddha fragments, 85–6 chairs and furniture, 67, 69, 71, 83, 126 shoes, 35–6, 44, 46, 47 temples, 69, 87, 98, 100, 101, 102, 126–7 Australian multiculturalism, 20, 21 Barmé, Geremie, 49 Bed (2004), 76 Beijing, 21, 22, 29–30, 68, 82, 97–101, 114 Beijing 2003 (2003), 96, 97 Beijing: The Second Ring (2005), 99–100, 101, 104 Beijing: The Third Ring (2006), 99–100, 101, 105 Beijing 10/2003 (book), 97 Beijing Film Academy, 30, 114 Bench (2004), 77 Berghuis,Thomas, 20 Biennale of Sydney, 2006, 11, 14, 21 Birds Nest Olympic Stadium (2007), 114, 121 Breaking of Two Blue-and-White ‘Dragon’ Bowls (1996), 62, 63, 85 Brush with Egg (1985), 34

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Campbelltown Arts Centre (CAC), 14, 19, 20–1, 22 Capital Iron Company, Beijing, 99, 115 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 83 Chandelier (2002), 68–9, 72 Chang’ an Boulevard (2004), 99, 103, 115 China. see also contemporary art in China cultural history, 28, 38, 51, 60, 63, 86, 87 cultural identity, 125–6 Cultural Revolution, 29–30, 49, 52 economic expansion and reform, 19, 31, 49, 50, 52 redevelopment and destruction, 21, 69, 87, 99, 101–02, 126, 127 China Art Archives and Warehouse (CAAW), Beijing, 68, 82, 89 Coca-Cola Company, 59 Colourfield painting, 87 Colour Test (2006), 87, 91 Commercial and Cultural Center, Jingdong New District, Zhejiang, 114 communism, 31, 49, 82, 88, 98, 115 Concrete (2000), 66, 68 contemporary art in China art market, 50 avant-garde, 49–50, 81 direction of, 51 institutional appropriation of, 13, 81 critical engagements China as a construct, 125–6 fragment as metaphor, 28, 86, 97, 98, 101–02, 113 history of antique Chinese objects, 51, 59–60, 63, 67, 85–86, 87 notion of the copy, 63, 88 opposition to power, 13, 22, 52, 64, 82 question of authorship, 63, 88, 89, 102 the value and meaning of objects, 28, 33, 59, 60, 63, 64 whitewashing, 37, 86–7 Dada movement, 34, 35, 37, 49 Dao Guang Blue-and-White Porcelain and Hammer (1988), 63–4 Deng Xiaoping, 50 Ding Ling, 29 Ding Yi, 89 Documenta XII 2007, Kassel, Germany, 15, 125–7 Dollar Bill (1983), 33

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), 26–7, 28, 58, 59–60, 83, 85 Duchamp, Marcel, 33–4, 35, 36, 37, 59, 82, 83 East Village (Dongcun), 81 expressionism, 31 Fairytale (2007), 14, 124, 125–7, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135 FAKE, 82, 113 Feet (2002), 84, 85 Feng Boyi, 81, 82 Five Raincoats Holding up a Star (1985), 34 ‘Forever’ Bicycles (2003), 112, 115 Fountain of Light (2007), 115–16, 122–3 Fragments (2005), 101–02, 113 freedom, 22, 30, 82, 127 ‘Fuck Off’ exhibition (2000), 12, 82 A Fur Painting (1998), 65 Gao Ying, 29, 35 Gazy, Mark, 11 Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain 1/3 (2005), 88–9, 93 Gold Distribution (Henri Cartier-Bresson), 83 GuangzhouTriennial of Art 2002, 68 Guan Wei, 14 Gu Wenda, 49 Hands (2003), 86 Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo (1994), 59, 60, 61 Hanging Man (1985), 12, 22, 32, 34, 35 Havilah, Lisa, 14, 19 Head (Warrior) (2004), 74 Herzog & de Meuron (architectural firm), 13, 114 HFF-Architecture, 114 Hokusai, Katsushika, 87 Huang Yong Ping, 49 In Between (2000), 68, 80 influences Dada movement, 34, 35, 37, 49 Duchamp, Marcel, 33–4, 35, 36, 37, 59, 82, 83 modernist aesthetic practices, 33, 37, 86 Warhol, Andy, 33, 35, 36, 37, 59, 82 Jingdezhen, China, 63, 88 Jinhua Ai Qing Cultural Park (2002), 114, 118–19 Johns, Jasper, 31, 33, 37 June 1994 (1994), 52, 54 Kassel, Germany, 125–6 Koons, Jeff, 82

Krauss, Rosalind, 36 Kronenberg, Simeon, 13 Ledderose, Lothar, 87 Liang Ye, 97 Li Shan, 19 Liu Xiao Xian, 14 Lumby, Catharine, 34 Lu Qing, 11, 14, 52 Ma Liuming, 81 Mao Zedong, 29, 30, 49, 52, 82–3 Map of China (2003), 100, 101, 102 mapping, 67, 100–01 Marble Chair (2008), 22, 128, 143 Martina Koppel-Yang, 30 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 29 Merewether, Dr Charles, 11, 14, 21, 22 modernism, 33, 37, 49, 67, 86 Monument to theThird International (1920) (Tatlin), 115–16 Museum for Neolithic Pottery, Jinghua (2007), 114, 120 Napack, Jonathan, 35 objet trouvée, 35, 63 Olympics 2008, Beijing, 22 Olympic Stadium, Beijing, 13, 114, 121 One-Man Shoe (1987), 12 Parsons School of Design, New York, 33 pop art, 59 post-impressionism, 31 pro-democracy movement in China, 30 Project at the Jinhua Architectural Art Park, Neolithic Pottery Museum, Jinhua Architectural Art Park (2007), 120 Provisional Landscape (2002–05), 97–8, 108–11, 127 Qiu Zhijie, 49 Qu Leilei, 31 Rancière, Jacques, 51 Rauschenberg, Robert, 37 readymades and assemblages in Ai Weiwei’s body of work, 12, 28, 34–6, 37, 50, 88, 102, 125 formulated by Duchamp, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 Roberts, Claire, 12 Rong Rong, 81, 114 Rossel, Raymond, 37 ‘ruins in reverse’, 28, 99, 116

Ruyi (2006), 87–8, 95 Safe Sex (1986), 12, 36, 39 Scully, Sean, 33 Shanghai, 82 Shanghai Biennale, 81, 82 Sherman, Brian, 11, 13, 14, 15 Sherman, Dr Gene, 11, 13, 14, 15 Sherman, Ondine, 14, 15 Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), Sydney, 11, 13, 14, 15, 20, 102 Sherman Visual Arts Residency (SVAR), Sydney, 11 Smithson, Robert, 99, 100 socialism, 31, 49, 99, 115, 116 South Africa, 13–14 Souvenir from Beijing (2002), 98–9, 106, 107 Soviet art, 115 ‘space in-between’, 35, 68, 83, 98, 127 Spitzer, Serge, 88 Stars group, 19, 30–1, 81 Still Life (1993–2000), 85, 86 Study of Perspective series (1995–2003), 22, 52, 55, 56, 57 surrealism, 37, 63 Sydney, 11, 13, 14, 15, 19–20, 21 Table and Beam (2002), 17, 69, 102 Tables at Right Angles (1998), 67, 70 Table with Two Legs on the Wall with Different Angles (2004), 67, 75 Tang Dynasty Courtesan in Bottle (1994), 50, 53 Tate Liverpool, 115 Tatlin, Vladimir, 115 Template (2007), 15, 126–7, 134 The Wave (2005), 94 Three Shadow Photography Art Center, Beijing, 114 Through (2007–08), 15, 102, 138–41 Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 31, 50, 52 Tinari, Philip, 69 To Be Looked At (From the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (1985), 12 Ton of Tea (2006), 79 Untitled (1986), 44 Untitled (1989), 43 Untitled (1993), 48, 50 Untitled (2005–2006), 69, 71 Untitled (1987) (coloured shoes), 46

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Untitled (no.1) (1987), 36, 41 Untitled (no.13) Mona Lisa Painting (1986), 40 Untitled (1987) (two soles), 47 Urs Meile Gallery, Beijing, 114 van Dijk, Hans, 89 violence in culture, 28, 50, 60, 63, 69 Violin (1985), 12, 34, 35 Voiceless, 14 Wang Xingwei, 89 Warhol, Andy, 33, 35, 36, 37, 59, 82 Western Sydney, 19–20, 21 White Stone Axes (2006), 78 Whitewash (1993–2000), 86–7, 90 Wok with Violin Bow (1986), 45 work architecture and design projects, 68, 82, 113–14 art practice, 21, 29–30, 35, 60, 67, 82, 87, 113 collage, 33 cultural anxiety in, 19 exhibitions, 30, 81, 82, 89, 115, 125–7 painting, 34, 36, 37 photography and video, 52, 59–60, 63, 97–8, 100 readymades and assemblages, 12, 28, 33, 34–6, 37, 50, 102, 125 Working Progress, 116 Wu Shan Zhuan, 49 Xu Bing, 49, 81–2 Yang Zhichao, 97 Yin Xiu Zhen, 11 Yiwu River Dam Project (2002), 117 Yuan Ming Yuan, 49 Yu Youhan, 19 Zeng Xiaojun, 82 Zhang Huan, 81

A UNSW Press book Published by University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA www.unswpress.com.au In association with Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 16–20 Goodhope Street, Paddington NSW 2021 ABN 25 122 280 200 www.sherman-scaf.org.au Campbelltown Arts Centre Cnr Camden & Appin roads, Campbelltown PO Box 57 Campbelltown NSW 2560 www.campbelltown.nsw.gov.au © Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and Campbelltown Arts Centre 2008 Copyright in the text is held by the author Copyright in the images is held by the artist First published 2008 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission.

Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Author: Merewether, Charles.

Title: Ai Weiwei : under construction /

Charles Merewether.

Publisher: Sydney : University of New South

Wales Press in association with

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

[and] Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2008.

ISBN: 9781921410734 (pbk.)

Notes: Includes index.

Bibliography.

Subjects: Ai, Weiwei–Exhibitions.

Other Authors/Contributors:

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.

Campbelltown Arts Centre.

Dewey Number: 709.2

Campbelltown Arts Centre is a cultural facility of Campbelltown City Council and receives support from the New South Wales Government through Arts NSW.

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation ProjectTeam Chairman, Executive Director Dr Gene Sherman Project Managers Danielle Earp and Charlotte Davy Editor Laura Murray Cree Proofreading Claire Armstrong and Laura Murray Cree Index Kate Lyons-Dawson from Caroline Colton & Associates Design Mark Gowing Campbelltown Arts Centre ProjectTeam Project Director Lisa Havilah Curator Dr Charles Merewether Education Programme Georgia Close Project Support Danae Natsis Exhibition Design Rhodes Wingrove Printed in Australia by Image Solutions Australia Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by UNIREPS Distributed in China, the United States and Europe byTimezone 8 Ltd email: info@timezone8.com www.timezone8.com Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation New Commission 1 May – 26 July 2008 Campbelltown Arts Centre New Commission as part of a major survey exhibition curated by Dr Charles Merewether 2 May – 29 June 2008