Known around the world for his powerful art and activism, Ai Weiwei works across many disciplines: his practice encompasses art, architecture, design, film, collecting and curating. In this exhibition, Ai uses design and the history of making as a lens through which to consider what we value.
At the heart of the exhibition will be a series of major site-specific installations. Hundreds of thousands of objects will be laid out on the floor of the gallery in a series of five expansive ‘fields’. These objects — from Stone Age tools to Lego bricks — have been collected together by Ai Weiwei since the 1990s, and are the result of his ongoing fascination with artefacts and traditional craftsmanship. These collection-based works have never been brought together before. Three of the fields have been created for this exhibition and will be seen for the very first time. The other two have never been seen in the UK before.
Ai Weiwei at the Design Museum, September 2022. Photograph by Rick Pushinsky for the Design Museum.
The five field works are:
At the heart of the exhibition will be a series of major site-specific installations. Hundreds of thousands of objects will be laid out on the floor of the gallery in a series of five expansive ‘fields’. These objects — from Stone Age tools to Lego bricks — have been collected together by Ai Weiwei since the 1990s, and are the result of his ongoing fascination with artefacts and traditional craftsmanship. These collection-based works have never been brought together before. Three of the fields have been created for this exhibition and will be seen for the very first time. The other two have never been seen in the UK before.
Ai Weiwei at the Design Museum, September 2022. Photograph by Rick Pushinsky for the Design Museum.
The five field works are:
• Still Life. 1,600 tools dating from the late Stone Age will be laid side-by-side as a reminder that the origins of the design are rooted in survival. These axe heads, chisels, knives and spinning wheels are presented as a terrain of forgotten know-how.
• Left Right Studio Material. This will consist of thousands of fragments of the remains of Ai’s porcelain sculptures that were destroyed when his ‘Left Right’ studio in Beijing was demolished by the Chinese state in 2018. The remains are a form of evidence of the repression that Ai has suffered at the hands of the Chinese government, as well as a testament to his ability to turn destruction into art. This field is displayed for the first time.
• Spouts. This field will feature around 200,000 porcelain spouts from teapots and wine ewers crafted by hand during the Song dynasty (960 – 1279 CE). If a pot was not perfect when it was made, the spout was broken off. The quantity bears witness to the scale of porcelain production in China a thousand years ago.
• Untitled (Porcelain Balls). These cannon balls were made during the Song dynasty (960 – 1279 CE) from Xing ware, high-quality porcelain. Ai was struck by the fact that this precious and seemingly delicate material was once used as a weapon of war. Approximately 100,000 will be on display, and the artwork has been created especially for this exhibition.
• Untitled (Lego Incident). Like other objects in the fields, Lego is produced on an industrial scale, but it is machine-made as opposed to hand-crafted. Ai started working with this material in 2014, to produce portraits of political prisoners. When Lego briefly stopped selling to him as a result, his response on social media led to overwhelming donations of bricks from the public. These donated bricks will be presented for the first time as fully-formed artwork.
• Left Right Studio Material. This will consist of thousands of fragments of the remains of Ai’s porcelain sculptures that were destroyed when his ‘Left Right’ studio in Beijing was demolished by the Chinese state in 2018. The remains are a form of evidence of the repression that Ai has suffered at the hands of the Chinese government, as well as a testament to his ability to turn destruction into art. This field is displayed for the first time.
• Spouts. This field will feature around 200,000 porcelain spouts from teapots and wine ewers crafted by hand during the Song dynasty (960 – 1279 CE). If a pot was not perfect when it was made, the spout was broken off. The quantity bears witness to the scale of porcelain production in China a thousand years ago.
• Untitled (Porcelain Balls). These cannon balls were made during the Song dynasty (960 – 1279 CE) from Xing ware, high-quality porcelain. Ai was struck by the fact that this precious and seemingly delicate material was once used as a weapon of war. Approximately 100,000 will be on display, and the artwork has been created especially for this exhibition.
• Untitled (Lego Incident). Like other objects in the fields, Lego is produced on an industrial scale, but it is machine-made as opposed to hand-crafted. Ai started working with this material in 2014, to produce portraits of political prisoners. When Lego briefly stopped selling to him as a result, his response on social media led to overwhelming donations of bricks from the public. These donated bricks will be presented for the first time as fully-formed artwork.
Image courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio / Design Museum.
Alongside the fields will be dozens of objects and artworks from throughout Ai Weiwei’s career that explore the tensions between past and present, hand and machine, precious and worthless, and construction and destruction. His Han dynasty urn emblazoned with a Coca-Cola logo, which will be on show, epitomises these clashes.
Highlights also include a number of examples of Ai’s ‘ordinary’ objects, where he has transformed something useful into something useless but valuable. He does this by crafting items with precious materials. These include a worker’s hard hat cast in glass which becomes at once strong and fragile, and a sculpture of an iPhone that has been cut out of a jade axehead.
There are also works that reference the Covid-19 pandemic which exposed our dependence on humble things. On display will be three toilet paper sculptures: two life-size rolls (one in marble and one in glass) as well as a 2-meter-long sculpture in marble which is being displayed for the first time.
These works are all shown in the context of China’s rapidly changing urban landscape, which Ai has documented through photography and film works, and are shown in the exhibition. The scale of demolition during the development boom in China over the last three decades is the backdrop to questions about aesthetic sensibilities that have been lost with modernisation.
A number of large-scale works will also be installed outside of the exhibition gallery so that all visitors to the Design Museum will be able to experience Ai Weiwei’s work. The most striking will be the Coloured House, the timber frame of a house that once belonged to a prosperous family in Zhejiang province, in eastern China, during the early Qing dynasty (1644 – 1911 CE). It will be installed in the Design Museum’s atrium where visitors will be able to walk within it. Ai Weiwei has painted the house with industrial colours, combining ancient and modern, and has installed it on crystal bases – giving presence and status to this unlikely survivor. This will be the first time Coloured House has been seen in the UK.
