A new retrospective at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) on the work of Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who has consistently challenged authoritarianism and championed free expression throughout his 40-year career, could not be more timely.
At a press preview last Friday, just hours after Donald Trump cut $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University over their Gaza protests and a few days before the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, CEO of SAM, Scott Stulen said, “In this moment we are called to act, speak truth to power, and stand for our beliefs even if that is difficult. You’ll see from this exhibition that resistance can come in many different forms.”
Indeed, over four decades, Ai's conceptually driven work has relentlessly explored new mediums, from sculpture and photography to installation and video.
He has been equally relentless in his criticism of oppressive regimes internationally, and was imprisoned by Chinese authorities on trumped-up charges of tax evasion in 2011.
That said, he’s also experienced silencing in the West, when his show at the Lisson Gallery in London was cancelled after his post on social media in November 2023 about the war on Gaza elicited controversy.
His post, which has since been deleted, suggested that the "sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people" had been transferred and held against the Arab world.
He also said that the Jewish community has a strong influence in the media, finance, and culture in the US, and that America's $3bn (£2.45bn) annual military support to Israel meant the two countries have a "shared destiny."
According to Ai, the gallery told him that his exhibition was "effectively cancelled due to his tweet."
A further three exhibitions — at the Lisson Gallery in New York and the Galerie Max Hetzler in Paris and Berlin — were also cancelled, although a version of the show is currently on at the Lisson in London.
At the time, Ai said, “I have always regarded free expression as a value most worth fighting for and caring about, even if it brings me various misfortunes... If free expression is limited to the same kind of opinions, it becomes an imprisonment of expression. Freedom of speech is about different voices, voices different from ours."
In a separate statement, Ai shared: "If culture is a form of soft power, this represents a method of soft violence aimed at stifling voices… It's not directed solely at me but at the broader culture of a society lacking a spiritual immune system. When a society cannot withstand diverse voices, it teeters on the brink of collapse."
These are words to contemplate on a tour of Ai's exhibition, entitled Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei.
The vast emporium of Ai’s oeuvre is not easy to digest in a single viewing and, even a week after the preview, it raises more questions than it answers.
As always, Ai is as much agent provocateur as artist — perhaps a natural evolution for the son of poet Ai Qing, who was exiled during the Cultural Revolution to a remote area near the Gobi Desert where he was forced to clean toilets.
Artistic innocence
The exhibition — 70% of which is from the collection of his patron Larry Warsh — traces four decades of his life and career.
The work from his time as a young man in New York City, where he was among the first generation of students to study abroad following China's reform in 1980, includes moments spent on the Lower East Side, where he met Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg (who wrote a poem about his father, whom he met in China).
This period is full of youthful artistic innocence, including black-and-white photography of the downtown scene and a Duchamp-inspired attempt at a coat hanger sculpture.
His return to China when his father was ailing in 1993 is punctuated by his provocative Study of Perspective photo series, in which the artist gives the middle finger to a variety of national monuments — from the White House to the Eiffel Tower — and an image of artist Lu Qing lifting her skirt in front of Tiananmen Square.
Also on view is a large neon sign of his old FAKE design studio in Beijing, spelled F.U.C.K. Fake is pronounced “fah-kuh” in Mandarin, and this is only one of many puns and plays on words the artist utilises.
Also included here is the artist’s controversial photo series Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) — a triptych recording his unplanned performance of dropping a Chinese ceramic vessel, a provocative act of desecration.
Even as Ai challenged Chinese conventions, he also became something of an insider, helping to design the infamous Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics with Herzog & de Meuron Architects.
This was shortly before he ran afoul of the regime for criticising their handling of the Sichuan province earthquake and started a 'citizen’s investigation' blog.
He was beaten by authorities in 2009, suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, and was eventually placed under house arrest in 2010 and arrested and detained for three months in 2011 on trumped-up charges of tax evasion.
When his passport was returned in 2015, he left China for Berlin, where he opened a large studio, but left Germany for Cambridge in 2019, saying it was “not an open culture.”
Since 2023, he’s been based in Montemor-o-Novo in Portugal, a place he says reminds him of the Gobi Desert.
Contextualising Ai's history
The SAM exhibit, curated by Foong Ping, Exhibition Curator and SAM’s Foster Foundation Curator of Chinese Art, attempts to contextualise the artist’s history through the theme of 'material disruptions' — exploring the artist’s inclination to amass and deconstruct various kinds of materials.
In a section called Homeward Found, the artist’s work in New York City is explored via his exposure to Dada and pop art. A highlight includes his Warhol-inspired Mao portraits — the last of his paintings.
A section called Relic, Ruin questions cultural value by employing found objects and treasured artefacts. Highlights include a Han Dynasty Urn jar with the Coca-Cola Logo, Useless Useless, which transforms everyday furniture into sculpture through inventive combinations, and Real Fakes, which challenges notions of 'real' versus 'fake'.
Moving on, Making Magnified showcases the spectacle of multiplicity enabled by mass production in China, featuring Sunflower Seeds (2010) — a work made of one ton of porcelain seeds, each shaped and decorated to resemble real sunflower seeds.
The final thematic chapter, called Watching Ai Watching Power, traces the artist’s journey into overt activism — often expressing solidarity with victims of disaster as well as state surveillance and oppression.
It includes the moving piece Names of the Student Earthquake Victims Found by the Citizens’ Investigation (2008–11), as well as a series of LEGO works, including Illumination (2019) — a recreation of the selfie the artist took during his arrest by Chinese authorities.
Also included is The Cover Page of The Mueller Report, Submitted to Attorney General William Barr by Robert Mueller on March 22, 2019 (2019).
On display to the public for the first time, the report on Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election, recreated with toy bricks, serves as a timely reminder of the fragility of the democratic process.
A section documenting the plight of migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq is also powerful. The artist’s controversial 2016 recreation of the infamous photo of 2-year-old Alan Kurdi lying face-down on a pebbled beach on the Greek island of Lesbos offers food for thought.
It remains a defining image of both the exhibition and our historical moment, although, as the artist told The New Arab, “I think we’re in a much worse moment than that time. Then it was just regional conflicts – now it’s a global condition, involving Russia and the US, the Middle East, Israel, Gaza, and Iran. We’re on the edge of another global war."
"It’s a crucial time.”
Hadani Ditmars is the author of Dancing in the No Fly Zone and has been writing from and about the MENA since 1992. Her next book, Between Two Rivers, is a travelogue of ancient sites and modern culture in Iraq. www.hadaniditmars.com
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Ai Weiwei’s art and activism explored in first US retrospective )
Also on site :