- Venue
- Lisson Gallery (London) Ltd
- Location
- London
With the release of Ai Weiwei on 22 June after his detainment for ‘tax evasion’, the 53 year old artist gains further notoriety in the art world as a symbol of the politics of free expression and criticism, yet it must be remembered that this is not another Nelson Mandela, but an artist critical of his country’s government. This could provide explanation for the West’s admiration and infatuation with his sculptures and installations that, particularly in these two exhibits expose governmental repression and corruption, themes that simply cannot be separated from their Chinese context.
An example comes in the form of Coloured Vases (2010) which critique the loss of traditional values to commercialism (Eastern or Western?) or Surveillance Camera (2006), a marbled sculpture of a CCTV camera as a dissection of the surveillance in his country, a hint at his own contained paranoia and the tradition of European aristocratic, Renaissance sculpting – and not dissimilar from Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four (1949). These works adjust well to the British climate-system and mode of thinking, about the way in which artists create a methodology whilst under watchful eye of censorship.
Some of the pieces, namely the video work Chang’an Boulevard (2004), seem not disconnected from their nationality, but rather palpable as (minimal) reflections of their location histories and appeal as gravely memorials to undisclosed heroes of the 1989 Tian’anmen Square protest. In this sense, Boulevard has a closer relationship with Coffin (2005), the result of iron wood dismantled from historical temples of the Qing Dynasty, and Coloured Vases which all seem to share themes of death, melancholy and history.
If antiquity is a central theme in these works, then it is certainly evident in Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, which, instead of understanding common struggles between culture, society and politics in China with the West, undermine that ‘sibling relationship’ as rivalry. The Heads are quite possibly embedded with supplementary historical context than some of Ai’s previous work as 12 oversized animal heads of the Chinese zodiac are loaned to Somerset House in an effort to rebuild an Orientalism that was replaced in China with a Eurocentrism – an “eye for an eye”.
What the Zodiac Heads possess, which work to a European viewer, is perspective as the technique was taught to Chinese painters by missionaries to emulate European style and thus remove their national work of flatness, which Japanese artist Takashi Murakami seems determined to test on contemporary art viewers with surprising results. The Heads are therefore ironic and symbols of exploitation as the Passover of the original heads through British and French hands have caused political stir in the contemporary, post-modern, post-colonial world that currently only function co-operatively for the sake of globalism. The Somerset House provides a stage for a ‘reversed Gilbert and Sullivan’ performance that will move from its first Tour stop (Britain) to France and so forth.
The sheer sight of the Heads demonstrate a working combination of atoms that surround a post-colonial nucleus, with a suitable entertaining prospect even for children, to create a “surreal spectacle”* only further impresses the viewer to their visual arrangement when they learn of the making-of of these curiosities.
* Richard Dorment in The Daily Telegraph, 2011