Both delicate and fearsome, the traditional Chinese dragon kite embodies a mythical symbol of power. Ai Weiwei unfurls a spectacular contemporary version of this age-old art form inside the With Wind in New Industries Building. He says that for him, the dragon represents not imperial authority, but personal freedom: “everybody has this power.” Scattered around the room are other kites decorated with stylized renderings of birds and flowers — natural forms that allude to a stark human reality: many are icons for nations with records of restricting their citizens’ human rights and civil liberties.
“The misconception of totalitarianism is that freedom can be imprisoned. This is not the case. When you constrain freedom, freedom will take flight and land on a windowsill.”
— Ai Weiwei
Ai’s studio collaborated with Chinese artisans to produce the handmade kites, reviving a craft that has a diminishing presence in China. By confining the kites inside a building once used for prison labor, the artist suggests powerful contradictions between freedom and restriction, creativity and repression, cultural pride and national shame. He also offers a poetic response to the multilayered nature of Alcatraz as a former penitentiary that is now an important bird habitat and a site of thriving gardens.
When.- September 27, 2014, through April 26, 2015.
Where.- Alcatraz, San Francisco, California. USA. EE.UU.
From the New Industries Building’s lower gun gallery, where armed guards once monitored prisoners at work, visitors peer through cracked and rusted windows to glimpse an enormous metal wing on the floor below. Its design is based on close observation of the structure of real birds’ wings, but in place of feathers, the artwork bristles with reflective panels originally used on solar cookers in Tibet, a region that has long struggled under Chinese rule.
Like With Wind on the floor above, this piece uses imagery of flight to evoke the tension between freedom — be it physical, political, or creative — and confinement. By requiring visitors to view the work from the gun gallery, the installation implicates visitors in a complex structure of power and control. Following in the footsteps of prison guards, visitors are placed in a position of authority, and yet the narrowness of the space creates a visceral feeling of restriction.
Blossom
In this work, Ai Weiwei quietly transforms the utilitarian fixtures in several Hospital ward cells and medical offices into fragile porcelain bouquets. The artist has designed intricately detailed encrustations of ceramic flowers to fill the sinks, toilets, and tubs that were once used by hospitalized prisoners.
Trace
While With Wind uses natural and mythical imagery to reference the global reality of political detainment, this installation at the rear of the New Industries Building gives that reality a human face — or many individual faces. The viewer is confronted with a field of colorful images laid out flat across the expanse of the floor: portraits of 176 people from around the world who have been imprisoned or exiled because of their beliefs or affiliations, most of whom were still incarcerated as of June 2014. Ai Weiwei has called them “heroes of our time.”
The exhibtion by Ai Weiwei is completed with three more works.- Stay Tuned, Illumination and Yours Truly.
