Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei | China b.1957 | Painted vases 2006 | Synthetic polymer paint on ceramic (Neolithic period) | 14 pieces ranging from 17 x 21cm (diam.) to 33.7 x 29 x 27cm | Purchased 2006. The Queensland Government's Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
b.1957 China
Lives and works in Beijing
After a brief involvement in the early Chinese avant-garde, Ai Weiwei moved to New York in 1981 and immersed himself in modern and contemporary art. Influenced by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, he began to critically address artistic traditions and conventions. Since returning to Beijing in the mid 1990s, he regularly addresses the economy of art and historical objects in China with his witty and iconoclastic sculptures, performances, photographs and installations.
Ai Weiwei has produced a number of works by refiguring antique furniture, architecture, sculpture and ceramics. For Painted vases 2006, he used inexpensive paints to transform traditionally monochromatic Han-dynasty vases into a brightly coloured array. Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) ceramics are admired for their refined lines, elegant proportions and the quality of their glazes. For modern collectors, the values and meanings attached to these objects are vested not only in aesthetic characteristics but also in their unique cultural authority, as evidence of one the greatest periods in China’s long history. Ai Weiwei has said of this radical work that it is ‘powerful only because someone thinks it’s powerful and invests value in the object’. The vases are valuable because the arbiters of taste and the art market have determined that this is so. In this work, the meaning and value of the vases is shifted and co-opted into a contemporary art piece, disrupting the prevailing value system to which it previously belonged.
Exhibitions (solo): ‘Ai Weiwei: World Map’ Galleri Faurschou, Beijing, 2009; ‘Ai Weiwei: Fairytale’, Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane, 2008; ‘Under Construction’, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, 2008; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, Switzerland, 2004. Exhibitions (group): ‘Contemplating the Void’, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York City, United States, 2010; Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art 2008, Liverpool, United Kingdom, 2008; ‘Half-life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Logan Collection’, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, United States, 2008; the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia, 2007; 'The 5th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art' (APT5), Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2006.
