philip tinari

Originally published in Ai Weiwei | Works | 2004-2007, JRP Ringier, 2008.

When Ai Weiwei’s first Beijing decade drew to a close in 2003, it was already clear how the period would be narrated. And in the intervening four years, his story has been recounted often, becoming a “fairytale” in its own right. Many are the newspaper and magazine accounts telling us how he moved upon his return from a decade in New York, first to the side what would prove his sick father’s deathbed, through a dialogue with the eager young artists of Beijing’s own “East Village,” past a long series of trips to the antique markets and work on underground publications, into the oppositional stance of the Fuck Off exhibition in millennial Shanghai, and finally to a studio home on what were once the far northeastern fringes of Beijing. It is a happy, even heroic story of a once wayward son who finds his way back and then, drawing on what he saw while away, begins to make things and take positions that both reflect and complicate the material and aesthetic circumstances in which he re-found himself.

At the risk of glibness, one might draw a demarcation between 2003 and everything after by noting how that year marked the end of one iconic series of works and the beginning of another, as the Study of Perspective photographs gave way to the Map of China sculptures. The former series depicts Ai’s erect middle finger intervening between his camera and seats of power—The White House, the Tian’anmen rostrum, the Reichstag—around the world. For all their surface childishness, these photographs make their statement with a sharpness that lingers even today—witness the unwillingness of Shanghai Customs to allow the circulation of one issue of Artforum at the ShContemporary art fair in September of 2007, owing to the fact that these photographs appeared as small illustrations buried deep within a profile I had written. But the outright provocative nature of these works, which visualize Ai’s one-word manifesto of “Fuck,” would give way, as the decade progressed, to a more nuanced consideration of his own relationship to the power structures and linguistic codes that bind all of us. Part of that new understanding has manifested itself in a heightened attention to China not as an abstract civilization and culture, but as the historically contingent nation-state of the People’s Republic. The Map of China sculptures, in which the precise political contours of the P.R.C. as defined by its leadership (including, of course, Taiwan) are first monumentalized in towering wooden compositions, then leveled into a 180-degree “bed,” or borne through a coffin-shaped log. The Map of China works announce and declare, but also limit and demarcate, the extent of China as a physical entity. In that way they represent an admission of the primacy of the state and its government in defining the more abstract notion of “China,” but also a sarcastic circumscription in which the nation is taken as nothing less, and nothing more, than its legal outline.

This transition from rebel to craftsman, from provocateur to bricoleur, might be the best way to approach these past few years of Ai Weiwei’s output. Similar examples abound: Vessels like the ceramic Han dynasty urn he shattered and photographed in the 1995 triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn reappear, but now they are painted in bright, almost celebratory latex colors. While the gesture is identical—the painted urns can be considered “destroyed” just like the shattered one—the effect is more playful, more formal, and ultimately more complex. Ai’s Colored Vases do more than submit the transmogrification of value from antiquity to contemporary as a conceptual gesture. They reorganize to form a playful study in composition that echoes with both avant-garde drip and color-field painting of the American mid-century and China’s current consumer kitsch. Through them we are granted an experience almost more ontological than aesthetic. As Ai has said of these works, “The act of changing the understanding and perspective of an object, or reworking an established concept, disrupts its stability and makes it questionable. To have other layers of color and images above the previous ones calls into question both the identity and authenticity of the object. It makes both conditions non-absolute: you cover something so that it is no longer visible but is still there underneath, and what appears on the surface is not supposed to be there but is there.” With little extra effort, this formulation of the state produced by conflicting layers can be read as a veiled commentary on the P.R.C. itself.

The transitions effected in other areas of Ai Weiwei’s practice are less obvious, but existent nonetheless. A line connects, for example, Ai’s signature reconfigured furniture works begun in the late 1990’s and still in progress with an untitled 2006 series of wooden objects that betray a bizarre fascination with perfect geometrical forms. In these later works, the deconstructive precision of the reassembled chairs and tables yields to an obsessive pursuit of the polyhedron, sometimes solid, others hollow. Ton of Tea composed of pressed Pu’er tea from Yunnan province, turns this mathematical formulism and conceptual directness onto the cube, its title providing its explanation in the same manner as works like Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn. Later in 2006, a set of tables each occupying an exact volume of one cubic meter (and appropriately titled Cubic Meter Tables) carried this investigation to its logical limit. In these works, Ai Weiwei seems to demonstrate an ability to create the well-tempered object almost as a hedge against his otherwise prankish material sensibility. In what can only be read as a wink at this phase of his own career, Ai created, also in 2006, the installation Bowl of Pearls, in which two custom-fired porcelain bowls one meter in diameter hold a seemingly bottomless trove of imperfectly rounded, and thus practically worthless, clear water pearls.

If these works mark one direction, two installations also growing from the early furniture works mark another: the first, untitled, links two iron interrogation chairs culled from the rubbish heap beside a local police station with an ornamental cloud-patterned beam culled from a demolished Qing dynasty temple; the second, Kippe, uses smaller pieces of temple wood to fill the negative space inside a gymnastic parallel-bar apparatus once used for physical education in a nearby school or factory. The iron elements in these two works evoke very specific historical memories tied to socialism, while the wooden portions connect back to older religious and imperial histories. Ai Weiwei’s repeated return to the gaudy, oversized chandeliers of Chinese officialdom (a material he first employed in his 2002 work Chandelier at the First Guangzhou Triennial) could be read as another such literal nod toward the P.R.C.’s material unconscious. Yet even this seeming readymade would be transmuted, appearing bent and distorted at the Asia Pacific Triennial in 2006, then shaped into the form of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and floating in the post-industrial murk off the Mersey at the Tate Liverpool in 2007.

A strand of sculptures in porcelain appeared in the period between 2004 and 2007 with no direct precedent in Ai Weiwei’s earlier oeuvre, save for the brief stint he spent working in a ceramics factory three decades before. This new material seems for Ai a constant source of quick amusement, be it mimetic, satirical, or even scatological. Over-wrought homages to Hokusai’s waves, splatters of dripped oil or spilt milk, succulent ripe watermelons, traditionally styled ruyi scepters in the shape of human organs, low-fashion flower-print girls’ dresses, and even a disembodied set of male genitalia suspended in mid-air by the stream of urine that they issue forth: the subject matter of Ai’s porcelains, all fired using the most orthodox techniques in the former imperial kiln town of Jingdezhen, seems to stray far from his other interests. The casual viewer might have difficulty in connecting an object as sublimely gauche as his heart-and-lungs ruyi to the austerity of Ai’s works in wood. And yet the notion of working alongside the kiln workers to come up with new possibilities for their technical competence resonates with much else in a practice extremely concerned with finding new looks for old materials. But there is something else at work here as well. These seemingly trifling works actually mark a fissure in Ai’s overall output, working along with installations like Newspaper Reader—a fiberglass statue of collector Uli Sigg reading a newspaper installed on a staircase in the Kunstmuseum Bern during Sigg’s 2005 collection show Mahjong – to immunize their maker from charges of shtick, or worse, dogma.

These smaller works now seem so interesting precisely because they were created in a period when other of Ai Weiwei’s works grew structural in scale. Looming like the columns of a Roman temple in ruins, his brightly colored, monolithic ceramic Pillars are one of several ways into a diverse group of works that also includes the textile sculpture World Map, the labyrinthine discarded-log structure Fragments, and edifice-like sculptures including the wooden Coffin and the marble Monumental Junkyard. These works are united in conflating artistic presence with architectural design. Fittingly so, as the last four years have also marked the birth, next to his studio, of a sprawling architectural atelier FAKE Design. In one sense the precedent for all these works is the site-specific sculpture Concrete, commissioned in 2000 by Beijing’s SoHo New Town development. A soaring, hollow “C,” it can be experienced or regarded as both art and architecture, sculpture and structure. This strand in Ai’s work finds its climax to date in the sculpture Template, realized for Documenta XII in 2007. A seven-meter-tall structure comprised of 1001 doors and windows salvaged from temples and home around China, it stood for just over one week after the exhibition opened before collapsing, poetically, amidst the temporary glass expanse of the Aue Pavilion. No attempt was made to resurrect the fallen.

For all his faith in modernism as “a kind of true living,” Ai Weiwei’s interest in architecture ranges far beyond the visual level of the structure. It resonates from there outward to encompass the built environment of the city writ large, and inward to the social milieu in which he lives his life. In 2004 he began an extended urban-research project aimed at publishing what he called simply the “China Book.” While a year of intensive labor by a team of documentarians, designers, and researchers was not ultimately able to bring the book about, it did lead to a series of works including the lyrically documentary videos Chang’an Boulevard, Beijing: The Second Ring and Beijing: The Third Ring and ultimately to the urban subjectivity of Ai’s much-read photographic blog. It is these projects that provide the most relevant and immediate grounding for last summer’s mass migration Fairytale, as the blog provided the mechanism by which the participants in that work were informed and assembled. Fairytale is most interesting not for its scale (the resources and logistics required to bring 1,001 Chinese to Kassel) but for its intent and reception. Continuously portrayed as an exercise in uniformity, it was actually an experiment in controlled chaos. Its participants were given passage, room, board, and nothing else other than a wristband allowing them entry to the exhibition. From there, they decided how to spend their time, form their social networks, and allocate their leisure money. In this way, the project provided a general microcosm of (Chinese) public life, in which certain parameters are set from above, but what unfolds inside of them defies regulation.

The entry for Fairytale in the Documenta XII catalogue lists the materials involved in the piece as “1001 Chinese Visitors, 1001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs.” This dualism between visitor and chair, between assumed identity and assigned objecthood, elucidates the two major modalities at work in Ai Weiwei’s projects of the past four years. In the works completed since Study of Perspective gave way to Map of China, there is a productive tension between a formal evolution ultimtely grounded in Ai’s continued appropriation of visual forms drawn from Chinese history and material culture—the Qing-dynasty chairs—and the imagined interlocutor who will, for example, laugh at the joke in porcelain, read the blog, walk through the building, or make the bizarre journey to Germany. It is in the poetry of this relational move—from gesture to appeal, from exposition to exhortation—that Ai Weiwei’s vision of a self-conscious modernism begins to bloom.

The chairs remained in Kassel long after the last of the visitors returned home, arranged by the curators into “circles of enlightenment,” a notion in which Ai Weiwei has never believed. Back in his studio, the visitors’ reclaimed black-and-white suitcases with their wandering tiled patterns were laid out in a perfect rectangle on the brushed concrete floor, their geometry disturbed only by the occasional cat. Some of the suitcases were worn down, others inscribed with initials and epithets in permanent markers—and yet the visitors’ boxes, now aligned in rigorous rank-and-file formation, conjured a vision of their former users as flag-waving actors in the Olympic opening ceremony that Ai Weiwei had, just days earlier, forsworn in the Guardian. This desire to parody a vision of a uniform history, so basic to the Map of China sculptures with which this period in Ai Weiwei’s work began, has taken increasingly complex, lyrical, and ultimately intense forms over the course these four fraught pre-Olympic years.