Ai Weiwei

Urs Meile ed., Ai Weiwei: Works from 2004 - 2007, Zürich, 2008, pp. 36 -39, illustrated in color

Iconoclasm and Coincidence: Four Works by Ai Weiwei

The four works offered here, Divina Proportion, 6.3-4, Colored Pots (Up and Down), and Colored Pots, demonstrate Ai Weiwei's far-ranging interests—as architect, connoisseur of antiquities, intellectual, and artist. Interestingly the first work, Divina Proportion, relates directly to another great polymath, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Leonardo and Ai Weiwei, separated by five thousand miles and half a millennium, were both fortunate to find themselves in rare circumstances that permitted and encouraged them to experiment in diverse fields. In the case of Leonardo, the enlightened patronage of Renaissance princes provided support and encouragement. With Ai Weiwei, the local free-for-all atmosphere has combined with diverse overseas support to produce a situation in which anything seems possible: witness Fairytale, his highly celebrated, massive project for last year's Documenta, which entailed bringing 1001 Chinese citizens and 1001 Ming and Qing dynasty chairs to Kassel, Germany, at a purported cost of three million euros.

Ai Weiwei's Divina Proportion is an impressive sculptural form over nine feet in diameter meticulously crafted from Huanghuali wood using nail-free furniture joinery techniques perfected in the Ming dynasty. The beautiful wood and faultless construction are in harmony with the regularity of the complex form, whose proportions are founded in the golden ratio. The golden ratio is a mathematical ratio that has fascinated thinkers since Euclid and Pythagoras because it finds frequent expression in nature and because the proportions are widely perceived as pleasing. It became the focus of much interest during the Renaissance and was frequently employed by artists and architects in their work.

Leonardo da Vinci produced one of the first representations of the polyhedron Ai Weiwei has built, a truncated icosahedron with twelve pentagonal faces and twenty hexagonal faces, like a soccer ball. Leonardo's drawing was published as an engraving in De Divina Proportione (1509), written by his close friend, the mathematician and Franciscan friar Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli (1445-1514/1517), who considered the golden ratio divine (hence the title). Ai Weiwei's Divina Proportion is titled after da Vinci's illustration, but it is not modeled from it: rather, it is modeled after a toy the artist bought for his cat, a small lattice-work ball with a bell in the center. When Ai Weiwei later chanced upon a book in which Leonardo's illustration was reproduced, he made the connection.

Although Ai Weiwei is not particularly interested in Leonardo or the golden ratio, he was fascinated to find an illustration that exactly depicts what he designed five hundred years later. Astonished to see what appear to be joinery techniques similar to those of the Ming dynasty, he considers that it would be extremely unlikely for someone to create such an illustration without modeling it after an object.^[i] His intuition is correct: Leonardo's illustration was most likely based on a wooden model, built either by him or by Pacioli.^[ii]

As a connoisseur of antiquities, Ai Weiwei has assembled vast collections of Neolithic objects, ranging from axe-heads, chisels, and whorls, to pots often grouped under the rubric "painted pots"; he has also collected later works, including fragments of Buddhist sculpture, components of old buildings, and Ming dynasty furniture. Treating these as "found objects," he uses them as materials for the creation of new works. Ai Weiwei first began to explore the concept of the ready-made when he lived in the United States (1981-93), and upon his subsequent return to Beijing, he found Chinese cultural materials to be a rich source of inspiration. Working with authorless objects from the past to create his own works of art highlights the essential question, "What is art?" This mode of production also means that, while being a connoisseur, Ai Weiwei is also an iconoclast: he destroys cherished objects literally as well as figuratively. His creative process at times devolves on violent destruction; for example, in one of several similar acts, he broke a precious blue-and-white porcelain dish with a hammer, signed the hammer, then displayed them together as Daoguang Blue and White Porcelain and Hammer (1998).

Colored Pots (Up and Down) and Colored Pots are part of an ongoing series. For the two groupings offered here, the artist has painted the pots vibrant Warholesque colors using Japanese latex house paints, so that a thin skin of modernity overlays the ancient vessels. In the moment of destroying their value as antiquities, Ai Weiwei affords them new status as contemporary conceptual art object. As he has remarked, "The 'colored [or painted] pots' are never colored. They have a long history, and there are so many of these pots. Always they are shown in the context of antiquity, and with great respect. But they can never get into the contemporary art museums, and contemporary art museums' exhibition conditions are much better than the conditions for exhibiting antiquities." Ai Weiwei's reworked pots will be accorded more attention and in more prestigious exhibition venues than the unaltered pots: thus, in this instance, "Even disrespect itself is respect."^[iii]

Ai Weiwei devotes over half his time to architectural and development projects, the highest profile among them having been Herzog & de Meuron's Beijing Olympic Stadium, for which he acted as Expert Consultant. Last August he publicly repudiated his involvement with the project, stating that he regrets contributing to the architectural centerpiece of the Olympics, which he considers a government public relations project, a friendly face covering up a multitude of offenses. Knowing this adds to the interest of 6.3-4, a series of twenty-four photographs of the Beijing Olympic Stadium taken one per hour over the course of a day in 2006.

6.3-4 is the expression of Ai Weiwei's ongoing interest in city development, particularly that of Beijing where he lives. He has accumulated thousands of photographs and thousands of hours of video documenting the changes occurring in urban China. Occasionally, some of these photographs or videos emerge in the form of works of art or publications: for example, in 2004 he published Beijing 10/2003, a book of photographs of the city taken while systematically driving its streets. Although Beijing is widely acknowledged as a global architectural hot spot, no-one else is devoting such effort to documenting the changes, from the moment a site is razed to the completion of the new building. As the Beijing Olympic Stadium will inevitably become a world architectural landmark, Ai Weiwei has been documenting its construction particularly thoroughly, albeit without any official permission. At the phase of construction captured in 6.3-4, the stadium resembled a tiara—an intermediate stage on the way to its final "bird's nest" form originally suggested by Ai Weiwei. Only this once did Ai Weiwei document the stadium construction around the clock, running from the evening of June 3 to the evening of June 4. Although June 4 is a highly significant date, as the anniversary of the 1989 massacre of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, according to Ai Weiwei the choice of the day was entirely random.^[iv] This is in contrast to the even more unlikely chance connection between Divina Proportion and da Vinci, which implies a highly significant meeting of the minds of two men equally fascinated by multiple aspects of the world around them.

Britta Erickson

[i] Conversation between the author and Ai Weiwei, 25 January 2008.
[ii] The City of Florence purchased a set of Pacioli's wooden models for display, probably in the Council Hall. See George W. Hart, "Virtual Polyhedra," in The Encyclopedia of Polyhedra, 1998.
[iii] Conversation between the author and Ai Weiwei, 14 July 2006.
[iv] It should be noted that a well-known 1994 photograph by the artist of his wife Lu Qing standing in Tiananmen Square takes the date of June 4 as its title.