IN REVIEW
AI WEIWEI:
BARE LIFE The Kemper Art Museum at Washington University is seeing a rush of eager visitors after undergoing a major remodel and expansion. The Kemper begins its new era with a major exhibition, Ai Weiwei: Bare Life. Along with a great array of mosaic, video, sculpture
and photography that Ai (in Chinese, the surname comes first) created over the past two decades, this jaw-dropping exhibition includes site-specific artworks designed and constructed for his St. Louis audience.
MILDRED LANE KEMPER ART MUSEUM The artworks that make up Bare Life fall into themes that coincide with Ai’s human rights advocacy. In his words and in his work, he urges others to take notice of global conditions and make an effort to become involved in the larger world. Questions asked of him by museum visitors reveal the larger-than-life stature that comes with his celebrity and the respect he has earned through a career made by standing up to authority. Ai is a contemporary master of the practice of appropriating readymades. Readymade art components are objects that serve a greater purpose for art than they did in their first life. They are objects that hold significant meaning separate and apart from their originally intended use. In much of Ai’s art, a common thing becomes powerful when it is pulled into a sculptural installation. Many of us were introduced to Ai Wewei through images of his famous 2009 project, Remembering, an art installation built from 9,000 backpacks (readymades) that represented more than 80,000 Chinese schoolchildren and teachers who died when their school collapsed in an earthquake. A child’s backpack has never held so much meaning. Remembering gained Ai notoriety because of the heartbreaking effect of the installation and it subsequently made him a target of Chinese governmental figures who did not appreciate the global attention paid to his investigation of corruption in the construction of the schools that collapsed. Ai’s use of readymade objects either in a group or as independent objects has intrigued me since I learned of him. While speaking to Kemper guests he recalled his introduction to
Exhibition Selfie of review author Kylin Hairston with Ai Weiwei and Carmon Colangelo of Washington University Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts (top), Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei: Bare Life, installation view (bottom left); Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn installation view (bottom right), (images courtesy of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum) 01 ALLTHEARTSTL.COM WINTER 2019/20
IN REVIEW
