BARE LIFE AI WEIWEI:

MILDRED LANE KEMPER ART MUSEUM

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. 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 eort 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 the use of readymade components when he came to live, study and work in New York in 1981. He says that the artwork of Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Marcel Duchamp greatly influenced him. He particularly admired the humor and attitude in Duchamp that inspired his tongue-in-cheek use of readymade objects to poke fun at society. His introduction in New York schools, museums and galleries to Dada and Pop Art set the tone for his work in later years.

While Ai’s artworks employ humor, his art-made statements about victims of mass production, struggles of refugees and general misuse of human lives for selfish gains of power holders are serious stu. When the group is displayed together, as now at the Kemper, visitors will find a pictorial commentary on human history. To understand the commentary, they must dig in and learn the language that Ai speaks through his art. The exhibit is organized into sections like two major parts of a textbook or semesters in a year-long course.

The Bare Life section reveals horrors of war past and present and governmental authority used against the people held by their power. The Rapture section forms a thick conversation around culture and, in particular, the rupture in China's history that came with the Cultural Revolution.

The triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn is in this section of the exhibit. Ai has formed mosaics from countless gray white and black LEGO tiles to create life-size portraits of himself in the act of destroying a priceless historic object. His Grapes makes use of 34 wooden stools from the Qing dynasty. The stools are joined together to become a seamless spiral, like a giant organism, an apt metaphor for the modern Chinese state that absorbs individuals and history until the past function of each is almost invisible.

Ai does not exempt any authority from his critique. Both sections of the exhibit make accusations in which a receptive viewer should find their own complicity. We are all participants in the consumption of mass production that occurs at the expense of the workers whose cultural history is erased in commercial rapid growth cycles. Ai seems to seek balance and harmony. He obtains both in his art but sees both sorely missing in almost all areas of our global society. Perhaps perfect balance and harmony can be obtained in art but are unattainable in society.

Closes January 5