New York’s East 53rd Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, is full of nondescript Manhattan skyscrapers. In the courtyard of one of these clinically clean buildings, however, there are five crumbling, old slabs of concrete covered in graffiti. It’s hard to believe that these blocks, so out of place in their surroundings, were once part of one of the most politically charged structures in the world, one that divided the globe in two based on ideology and geopolitics — the Berlin Wall.
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Ai Weiwei’s survey at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC ended this past Sunday, and on that last day clusters of visitors gathered around each piece with camera phones out in documentation, especially at the end piece “Cube Light.” The highly photogenic glimmering box of glass crystals from his Chandelier series of large-scale installations is a conceptual monolith, and seems to unintentionally echo the flash of light from his own camera phone in his famous 2009 arrest photo displayed in a gallery below. It was that story of his own championing of documentation, especially through social media, that made the wandering camera phone mob seem like a component of the exhibition, a way for his art to fly out from the walls of the museum through digital waves while he himself is still unable to leave China.
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Would you think an artist dead set on destroying ancient vases would be quite so romantic? The Elton John AIDS Foundation has commissioned Ai Weiwei to create a short video animation published on the occasion of Valentine’s Day, and the results are… unexpected.
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I think it’s happened: I’ve hit my Gangnam Style limit with this new video by Anish Kapoor and his cohorts in museums and galleries (not to mention random offices and people) around the world.
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The Museum of Modern Art posted this pretty fantastic photo on its Facebook page today — a shot of museum staff going Gangnam Style in support of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. If you’re confused about why a New York museum would support a Chinese artist by dancing to a mega-popular song by South Korean rapper PSY, a little background.
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The first survey of Chinese installation artist Lin Tianmiao at Asia Society, called Bound Unbound, could not have a more fitting title. The artist’s sartorial sculptures, grotesque bodies, and fibrous compositions illustrate an artist bound by cultural convention creating art unbound in technique and concept.
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BEIJING — “BEIJING AUTUMN: OFF THE RADAR ART RESISTANCE IN CAOCHANGDI —CCD300″ is the SMS that was sent to advertise an exhibition project called Manmade and Natural Disasters, started by a group of artists living and working in the Caochangdi art village to the northeast of Beijing. A similar notice was posted on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. There were no other forms of advertising: Everybody knew in advance that the topic of the show and some of the artworks and the names involved would attract the attention of government censors.
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With this one, the title pretty much says it all. Ai Weiwei’s entire studio has participated in a remake of South Korean rapper PSY’s epic global pop hit “Gangnam Style.”
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BERKELEY, California — At Haines Gallery in San Francisco’s Financial District, I finally got to see Ai Weiwei’s notorious “Kui Hua Zi” (Sunflower Seeds). There has been much hype around Ai Weiwei and this particular installation, and seeing it caught me by surprise. The Haines Gallery installation was smaller than I expected and much calmer than the media surrounding it. Yet as I looked on, the piece and its maker’s history withdrew into the background, while its powerful implications and art historical relevance grew. It is a truly remarkable piece.
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Last Thursday, the Chinese government rejected artist Ai Weiwei’s appeal of a $2.4 million fine levied against his FAKE design studio company for tax evasion, a charge that most regard as trumped up to justify the artist’s arrest last year. Ai says there’s no way he’ll pay.
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