The China Project

145 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection AI Weiwei Throughout his diverse practice, Ai Weiwei constantly provokes and challenges established canons of cultural authority, authenticity and value. Ai Weiwei’s works in the Gallery’s Collection from this later period of his practice include reconstructed Qing-dynasty furniture sculptures Table with two legs 2004 and Pillar through round table 2004–05; Feet 2005, consisting of the foot fragments of looted Buddhist statuary dating from the Northern Wei (386–535AD) and Northern Qi (550–577AD) dynasties; as well as Painted vases 2006, in which 14 Neolithic earthenware pots have been over- painted in bright monochrome pigments. In these works, Ai Weiwei uses antiquities, often reassembling them into absurd and useless configurations. Whether through destruction or recontextualisation, he transforms the meaning of the objects he appropriates, while also subverting dominant cultural, aesthetic and economic value systems. In summarising Ai Weiwei’s practice, curator Sarah Tiffin notes a certain Dadaist sensibility, but observes that while a Duchampian wit pervades his practice . . . many of the materials Ai uses are anything but the banal, everyday objects so often found in Dada ready-mades. A discerning connoisseur and collector of Chinese antiquities, Ai creates a very refined anarchism. He takes objects that are hallmarks of Chinese cultural excellence — Buddhist sculpture, Ming and Qing furniture, Neolithic and Han dynasty ceramics — and playfully transforms them to create works that challenge the authority of cultural value, meaning and authenticity. More than rhetorical irony, this questioning represents a genuine investigation to expose more fundamental truths. ‘By changing the meaning of the object, shaking its foundation,’ he suggests, ‘we are also changing our own condition. We can question what we are’. 1 The most spectacular of Ai Weiwei’s more recent works in the Collection is Boomerang 2006, an impressive chandelier designed for and installed in the Queensland Art Gallery’s Watermall for ‘The 5th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’, 2006. In Boomerang , Ai Weiwei departs from his use of antiquities. Composed of 270 000 crystal pieces and measuring over eight metres in height, the work can be viewed from a number of perspectives when installed in the Watermall space for which it was designed. There is a certain gaudy vulgarity in the outlandish scale and grandiose statement of consumption that this work encapsulates. This oversized symbol of modernity — the chandelier is ubiquitous to China’s more ostentatious buildings — also signals another ominous, darker reality. With the heady rise in material wealth and consumption in China, achieved at staggering speed, the transformation in the cityscape has been equally monumental. The speed with which this change has occurred has resulted in the destruction of numerous historical buildings and the large-scale razing of older neighbourhoods to make way for new construction. On a deeper level, Boomerang could also be seen as a meditation on the disappearance of the historical past, as the dazzling allure of the modern, and as a monument to transience. endnote 1 Sarah Tiffin, ‘Ai Weiwei: Refined anarchy’, in The 5th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2006, p.52. above Boomerang (installation view) 2006 Glass lustres, plated steel, electric cables, incandescent lamps / 700 x 860 x 290cm (irreg.) / Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2007 This work is not displayed in the ‘Three Decades’ exhibition. opposite Painted vases (detail) 2006 Synthetic polymer paint on ceramic (Neolithic period) / 14 pieces ranging from 17 x 21 x 21cm to 33.7 x 29 x 27cm / Purchased 2006. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund Pillar through round table 2004–05 Pair of elmwood half tables assembled into a single table (Qing dynasty 1644–1911), bisected horizontally by an ironwood pillar (Qing dynasty 1644–1911), on two ironwood pillar fragments / 140 x 656.5 x 123cm (installed) / Purchased 2006. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund