“If you don’t Speak your mind, then who are you” Ai weiwei
Ai Weiwei is a chinese artist known for his continuous criticism and provocation of the chinese government. He was detained yesterday and most of his work was confiscated. He had several clashes with the government if not personally at least on the world-wide web. His blog was always under watch and continually firewalled. You might remember his Tate Modern’s Sun flower installation where he covered the whole ground with hand crafted porcelain sun flower seeds. Each Seed was individually painted by the town that once made porcelain for the imperial court. Whats absurd about the story is that the town was saved from bankruptcy by making those seeds. The purpose of the installation was to explore the “made in china” phenomenon and the mass production exports coming out from china. Each seed represents a work of art, represents a person’s source of living and yet the whole picture blurs this fact as it does in the real life exports from china. We fail to see the hands behind all those mass productions. The work also questions the place of art in the chinese society; how a town that was once famous for its porcelain works ended up making thousands of seeds if not millions to save itself from poverty. The effects of the world trade on the chinese culture.
Photo Courtesy of the Tate Modern Museum
Also another interesting project was the “Study in Perspective” series from 1995 to 2003 where he captured his middle finger in front of political buildings in Beijing, Berlin, Paris, Washington DC and Hong Kong.
Photo Courtesy of Ai Weiwei
“Map of China” 2003 is another controversial work where he assembled a 50 cm tall extrusion of the map of china from the salvaged wood of the demolished Qing dynasty temples. The “map” was assembled without one single nail through a traditional method of jointing.
An interseting Documentray made by Alison Klayman: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ai-wei-wei/ai-weiwei-story/
ARTSIE ARTSY 
