Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei is heading to the Design Museum in London this spring with a major new exhibition unveiling works inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic (Ai Weiwei: Giving meaning, April 7-July 30). Three toilet paper sculptures will be on display – two life-size rolls, one in marble and one in glass – demonstrating the demand for basic disposable products during the coronavirus crisis.
The exhibition – described as the first to frame Ai’s work through the lens of architecture and design – also focuses on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the changing urban face of Beijing over the of the past three decades.
“[The show includes] things that we consider worthless in ordinary times, something as worthless as a roll of toilet paper, which during the pandemic suddenly became valuable… it was a real cue to him of how objects can gain and lose value depending on the context of our time,” said Justin McGuirk, the Design Museum’s chief curator and curator of the exhibition, during an online press launch. Basically, “we are not introducing Ai Weiwei as a designer and architect… [but] using his work and reflection to reflect on design and architecture,” he added.
A number of site-specific installations, comprising hundreds of thousands of objects arranged in sections called “fields”, form the centerpiece of the exhibition. These are works collected by Ai in recent years, including items such as Stone Age tools and Lego bricks. The show will also include Ai’s largest Lego work ever.
“It’s a program about values; it is a meditation on cultural values and their evolution over time. It features a manufacturing history spanning thousands of years,” McGuirk said. “When you collect so much…it speaks to you about human society,” Ai said at the launch.
One of the “fields”, titled left right studio equipment, includes fragments of Ai’s porcelain sculptures that were destroyed when his Left Right workshop complex in Beijing was demolished by the Chinese state in 2018. “They [the pieces] have moral value,” Ai said. The Lego ‘field’ will display bricks donated to the artist after the company temporarily stopped supplying him with materials following his Lego portraits of political prisoners.
Another “field” includes nearly 2,000 neglected Neolithic stone tools that Ai began collecting in the 1990s from places such as flea markets. “No one paid any attention to them…they [market vendors] I was really surprised that I wanted them,” Ai said.
Between the 200,000 porcelain spouts of the teapots and wine ewers and the 100,000 porcelain balls alongside them, another of the fields highlights ancient crafts. “We often say that modern people don’t know how to wash dishes,” Ai said. “In some senses, we understand less…the feel, texture and shape of forms created by human hands.” Ground sections of the exhibition will not be closed to visitors.
The tension between handmade and industrially produced items underpins the show, McGuirk added, pointing to the turbulent and transitional period China has gone through over the past 30 years. Ai described the changing face of Beijing as a result of “the huge scale of urbanization and development that has brought about a lot of destruction, devaluing of history, erasure of streetscapes and architecture,” added McGuirk.
Meanwhile, the coffin rebar and case (2012), refers to the earthquake that devastated Sichuan province in 2008, killing 70,000 people. More than 5,000 students were crushed under the rubble of their collapsed school buildings. The new job Nian Nian (2022) consists of 26 engravings depicting over 1,000 names hand-engraved into a jade seal using calligraphy, creating a graphic memorial to deceased children.
Some works will be presented outside the exhibition space, including colorful house, the timber frame of a house that once belonged to a family in Zhejiang Province, eastern China, during the early Qing dynasty (1644-1911). “The loss of cultural memory is really one of the themes of this show…Ai brings together the old and the new,” McGuirk said.
• Listen to our detailed information A brush with… podcast interview with Ai Weiwei here