Ai Weiwei

Gallery Faurschou, Copenhagen and Beijing 
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colours: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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Kui Hua Zi draws together many of the themes and formal concerns of Ai's work to date, in a sculptural work which is at once singular and complex in form and meaning. Throughout his career, Ai has sought to reconcile China's artistic legacy with its contemporary art practice, exploring traditional techniques in a contemporary language, to revive the skills that made China's artists and craftsman the envy of the world until Mao all but stamped out their traditions in the second half of the Twentieth Century.

When we first encounter this quiet sculpture, which can be installed either in a corner, as a carpet or as a mound (as illustrated here), a viewer familiar with Western contemporary art might think of the sculptures of Felix Gonzalez Torres made of sweets which the viewer is invited to touch and even eat. As one gets closer to Ai's sculpture, however, the realisation that these ostensibly edible seeds are in fact made of heavy, cold porcelain releases new layers of meaning. The knowledge that each has been individually hand made and the time and effort involved in the laborious process gradually sink in. While the quantity and scale echoes the scale of industrial mass production, referencing the cheap goods consumed by the West and fabricated cheaply in China, the precious nature of the material and its status as fine art force a reappraisal.

In China, the sunflower seed is loaded with symbolism. It is first and foremost a tasty street snack, something to be enjoyed with friends and offered to guests. It is a particular skill in China to shuck a sunflower seed using the gap between the two front teeth. During Ai's childhood, piles of empty husks on the floor would be the ephemeral remains of social activity or, most likely, a record of a meeting of the local communist party. Indeed for his generation, the sunflower motif takes on a much more potent significance. In official posters and portraits, Chairman Mao depicted himself throughout his reign as the sun and all his subjects like sunflowers, whose heads turn to follow him wherever he went, in subordination and to bask in his glory. During his Great Leap Forward, from 1958-1961 and beyond, in which Mao set excessively high production targets for collective farms in order to pay off arms debts with Moscow by exporting grain, some thirty million are conservatively estimated to have starved to death. In these penurious times, just a pocket full of sunflower seeds could make the difference between life and death for Chinese agricultural families. Seen here as a giant pile, measured by weight, the Kui Hua Zi allude to the unattainable agricultural quotas of Mao's regime which saw much needed agricultural goods shipped outside China's borders at unfathomable human cost. At the same time, they represent the most basic needs of the calorie-deficient populace and metaphorically they suggest human compassion. As such, Kui Hua Zi is an incredibly stirring sculpture and one which has already become an icon of this important sculptor's oeuvre.