The China Project

105 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection AI Weiwei Ai Weiwei is a key figure in contemporary Chinese art, as an artist, architect, curator, publisher, commentator and editor. Both of his parents were poets; his father, Ai Qing, was a writer of note and influence until Mao Zedong’s anti-intellectual repressions of the 1950s. In 1958, a year after Ai Weiwei was born, the family commenced a 20-year exile in a remote part of north-west China, where his father was assigned the menial task of cleaning latrines. They returned to Beijing in 1975 when Ai Qing once again found favour at the end of the Cultural Revolution. These difficult years in exile profoundly affected Ai Weiwei’s attitudes and led to his determined and continued questioning of the relationships between power, authenticity and value. While a student at the Beijing Film Academy (1978–1981), Ai was a founding member of the Stars Group, which championed freedom of thought and expression, and was part of what became known as the pro-democracy movement. The group’s first exhibition was attended by some 40 000 people, but its members did not stay together for long, and many left China, including Ai. In 1981, Ai arrived in New York where he immersed himself in modern and contemporary American and European art, particularly the work of Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and American minimalists such as Donald Judd. The works he created during this period display a Duchampian irony, indicating his interest in the everyday objects of the readymade — raincoats, shoes, gardening implements, books, coat hangers and musical instruments — and their reconstruction, negating their original purpose in a neo-Dadaist questioning of utility, meaning, authenticity, value and the authority of the creator. Returning to China in 1993, Ai resettled in Beijing. Artists in China at this time had limited access to information on contemporary art, both of work being made in China as well as internationally. His publication of Black Cover Book 1994 (with curator and critic Feng Boyi, and artists Xu Bing and Zeng Xiaojun), followed by White Cover Book 1995 and Grey Cover Book 1997, provided images and information on both contemporary artists working in China and Western artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons. The set of three black-and-white photographs, Dropping a Han dynasty urn 1995, documented a private performance of Ai dropping a two-thousand-year-old urn. The dropping of the urn is captured in the three still images: the first frame sees Ai holding the urn, the second captures the urn suspended in mid air as it falls, and the third shows the urn in shards at Ai’s feet. This was an important work for Ai and, as Charles Merewether has said: 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. 1 The violence of this act encapsulates particular meaning when considered within the context of contemporary China — which has been bulldozing its way into modernity, and where making ruins has become a daily business. The destruction may also be cathartic, paving the way for reconstruction and renewal, while raising the volatile terrain of ‘value’. On this latter subject, Ai Weiwei has suggested that his action is ‘powerful only because someone thinks it’s powerful and invests value in the object’. 2 endnotes 1 Charles Merewether, Ai Weiwei: Under Construction , University of New South Wales Press in association with Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation [and] Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2008, p.28. 2 Charles Merewether (ed.), Ai Weiwei Works: Beijing 1993–2003 , Timezone 8, Hong Kong, China, 2003, p.31. Dropping a Han dynasty urn 1995 Gelatin silver photograph, AP, ed. of 3 / 3 sheets: 180 x 169.5cm (each) / Purchased 2006. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund This work is not displayed in the ‘Three Decades’ exhibition.