“The most dangerous man in China”; Ai Weiwei on display at Springfield Museums

The work of Ai Weiwei, a contemporary artist who has been recognized as an icon of China’s human rights struggle, will be shown in a new exhibition opening this weekend at Springfield Museums.

The exhibition “Ai Weiwei: Tradition and Dissent” focuses on artworks that speak in particular about his interaction with Chinese materials, styles, motifs, and antiques. Ai Weiwei: Tradition and Dissent opens to the public on July 17 and will be on display until January 2, 2022 at the Musée d’Amour of Fine Arts.

Many will know AI’s work from the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He was one of the artists who designed the Beijing National Stadium, better known as the Bird’s Nest Stadium.

“Ai Weiwei makes the new the old again by creating a thoughtful link between his Chinese cultural heritage and his creative endeavours,” said Maggie North, curator of art at Springfield Museums. “Many of the artist’s modern works revive and at the same time recreate the handicraft practices of the past including wood carpentry, painting on porcelain, and carving on marble.”

Several recent works by the 63-year-old artist revive and reformulate the craftsmanship practices of the past including woodworking, painting on porcelain, and marble sculpture, according to the museums.

Ai Weiwei, Zodiac, 2018, LEGO bricks, 12 individual panels 45 x 45 inches each. private group. (Image courtesy of the artist.)

Other works, such as the artist’s Zodiac made of LEGO bricks, use contemporary materials to re-imagine symbols of cultural significance.

Museums describe the artist as “one of today’s most diverse creative minds” and highlight that through his work he is “an outspoken critic of the Chinese government”.

In 2011, Weiwei was arrested in China after a government crackdown on so-called “political dissidents” – a specific category the Chinese government uses to classify those seeking to undermine state power – for “alleged economic crimes” against the Chinese. status. Weiwei used his art to address the corruption of the Chinese Communist government and the neglect of human rights, particularly in the field of freedom of expression and thought.

“Ai Weiwei creates work that addresses social justice while promoting dialogue between traditional Chinese artistic practices and modern modes of expression,” said Heather Haskell, Vice President and Director of Art Museums. “He is best known for redefining objects and materials, by applying automobile paint to Han Dynasty ships, for example and by using these unconventional techniques, urging the viewer to deal with the tension between construction and destruction as well as the ancient and the contemporary.”

In 2014, he was again in trouble with the People’s Republic of China and placed under house arrest for his activism on behalf of the thousands of children killed in an earthquake in Sichuan Province.

Many schools in the quake zone collapsed while the surrounding buildings remained standing. Estimates vary, but it is said that as many as 7,000 classrooms collapsed and as many as 10,000 students died. Altogether, nearly 70,000 people died in the earthquake. At the time, the earthquake was China’s deadliest natural disaster in three decades.

Ai Weiwei, surveillance camera, 2010, marble, 15 x 16 x 8 inches. private group. (Image courtesy of the artist.)

His questioning of the status quo and his opposition to the Chinese government led Smithsonian to question whether he was in fact “the most dangerous man in China”.

He was barely a year old when his family was exiled to Xinjiang, northwest China, in retaliation for his father’s political views against the government.

His father was Ai Ching, a well-known Chinese poet who was accused of anti-socialism and sent to a labor camp in a remote area of ​​China. His family followed him there, and Ai grew up watching his father subjected to hard labor and publicly shamed.

Ai now lives in exile from his home in Beijing, on a rural farm east of Lisbon, Portugal.

“I love Portugal,” he told Reuters in March after moving to Europe from his former home in Cambridge, England.

“I’m going to stay here for a long time unless something happens,” he said.

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