Flip Off Symbolically Powerful Places With Ai Weiwei’s Middle Finger

For his project Study of Perspective, artist and activist Ai Weiwei took photos of himself flipping off “significant institutions, landmarks and monuments from around the world”, notably Tiananmen Square in 1995. Using this Google Street View-enabled web tool, you can use Ai’s middle finger to flip off anything you’d like, anywhere in the world.

I’ve included a few examples above from the site’s archive. In a brief review of what folks have done with the site recently, I observed several shots of the Kremlin, the Eiffel Tower, churches, and various Trump buildings, but I also saw the Stonewall Inn and other gay landmarks.

• Ai Weiwei
• art
• Google Street View
• maps
• remix

Ai Weiwei’s Lego Version of Monet’s Water Lilies

Lego bricks and Impressionism are a natural pairing, and so Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has recreated Claude Monet’s massive Water Lilies triptych with 650,000 Lego bricks. Spanning nearly 50 feet across, the Lego sculpture is part of Ai’s upcoming show at the Design Museum in London. Here is a tantalizing behind-the-scenes view.

Ai has been creating Lego works for years now — including these Warhol-esque portraits and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — and was even denied from buying bricks from the company at one point.

• Ai Weiwei
• art
• Claude Monet
• Lego
• remix

Coronation, Ai Weiwei’s Documentary about the Pandemic Lockdown in Wuhan

Coronation is a feature-length documentary film by Ai Weiwei about the lockdown in Wuhan, China, during the initial Covid-19 outbreak in early 2020. The trailer is not super compelling tbh, but it’s Ai Weiwei and the description sounds interesting:

The film showcases the incredible speed and power of China’s state machinery with its construction of massive coronavirus hospitals, deployment of roving sanitation-fogging robots, implementation of an exhaustive testing and contact-tracing protocol, and punctiliously engineered protective measures for health workers.

On the other side of the scale is the crushing bureaucracy of that same machine, its totalitarian decision-making, clear deception of ordinary citizens, the absence of civic communication, and perhaps, worst of all, a cold-eyed lack of empathy for those suffering loss and kept away from home.

Ai Weiwei paints a moving and revelatory portrait not just of China’s response to the pandemic but also of ordinary people in Wuhan, showing how they personally cope with the disaster.

Hyperallergic’s Dan Schindel has a review of the film. You can watch Coronation on demand at Vimeo or Alamo. (via colossal)

• Ai Weiwei
• China
• Coronation
• Covid-19
• movies
• trailers
• video

Sunflower Seeds

The newest exhibition in The Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Room is Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds:

The room is filled with millions of handcrafted ceramic sunflower seeds:

Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands. Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape.

Porcelain is almost synonymous with China and, to make this work, Ai Weiwei has manipulated traditional methods of crafting what has historically been one of China’s most prized exports. Sunflower Seeds invites us to look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today.

For the first couple of days, people could walk around on the tiny sculptures (as you can see on Flickr), but health concerns prompted the museum to put a stop to that. Still pretty cool, but this remains my favorite Turbine Hall exhibition. (via hilobrow)

• Ai Weiwei
• art
• exhibitions
• London
• museums
• Tate Modern