Until September 4, 2022 the work of the Chinese artist, human rights activist and critic of authoritarian systems Ai Weiwei (*1957 in Beijing) can be discovered at the Albertina Modern museum at Karlsplatz 5 in Vienna in his most comprehensive retrospective to date. Guest curator Dieter Buchhart, together with Elsy Lahner, assembled a unique show presenting 144 objects. Here comes my book review of the accompanying catalogue: Ai Weiwei: In Search of Humanity (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de).
The catalogue Ai Weiwei: In Search of Humanity offers three essays by Dieter Buchhart, John Tancock (regarding the readymade and beyond) and Roger M. Buergel (about grief, suffering, rage in the artist’s works and their political dimension) as well as depictions of all 144 works exhibited in Vienna, ranging from his early works to New York and Beijing photographs, Tiananmen Square Massacre works, studies of perspectives, works on cultural heritage, bicycles, the Sichuan Earthquake, arrest, imprisonment, war, flight and migration, the U.S. presidential elections, corona and more. A short biography is added at the end of the 336-page catalogue.
At the beginning of his essay, Dieter Buchhart quotes Ai Weiwei with his words from 2010: “Everything is art. Everything is politics.” This surely holds true for the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Dieter Buchhart draws a comparison between the Dada artists in Zurich who responded to the madness of the First World War with their “anti-art” and Ai Weiwei who himself was and is in search for humanity in another period of horrors.
According to Dieter Buchhart, Ai Weiwei’s felt loss of humanity in the face of the suffering of migrants and refugees, the continuation of war, misery, authoritarian regimes and fascism in our own day began already in the 1980s, after the general loss of faith in modernism, when Ai Weiwei made objects influenced by Marcel Duchamp (German article on Duchamp) and Dadaism; read also my review about the 2011 Winterthur exhibition Interlacing in which Ai Weiwei stressed the importance of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol for his work.
Dieter Buchhart stresses that in each of these works, there is also a direct link to Ai Weiwei’s own history, the past, or current events. He expanded Duchamp’s dictum of “artist—artwork—beholder” to a “chain between artist (thinker, cultural critic, concept maker)—readymade—(exchangeable object
with no inherent value)—beholder” with objects where readymades, like pieces of clothing, serve as artistic material but are transformed into new objects. The artist’s old shoes, for example, form a circular sculpture, while an umbrella jammed into a briefcase make up a Quintessential Communist Umbrella Briefcase, which by way of the sprayed-on Communist symbols of a hammer and sickle refers to the Cold War.
Dieter Buchhart writes that the next event that shaped Ai Weiwei’s search for humanity happened when the artist was living in New York: the violent crushing of the student-led protests at Tiananmen Square in Beijing which led to the death of up to 10,000 people. In 1993, the artist returned to his ailing father in China, who died in 1996. That was when Ai Weiwei began to stick his middle finger at Tiananmen Square as a sign of resistance, and subsequently at all monuments around the world that symbolize power and domination.
After his return to CCP China, Ai Weiwei began collecting antiquities, including furniture and ceramics, and publishing underground texts of the Chinese avant-garde. In 1995, he created a series of photographs in which he deliberately dropped a Han dynasty urn so that it smashed to pieces on the ground. In the process, he demonstrated that the destruction of the historical is necessary to create the new. Dieter Buchhart underlines that it was not only the actual demolition of objects, but also of concepts and “isms,” that made it possible to build anew. Ai Weiwei subsequently pulverized several ceramics from the Neolithic period for the installation Dust to Dust, preserving the dust in glass vessels. By adding the Coca-Cola logo to Han dynasty urns, he transformed them into symbols of present-day consumer society and, as contemporary reworkings, a mirror of our period and the link between the two worlds, that of the West and the Far East, between which Ai Weiwei moved and continues to move today.
According to the Ai Weiwei: In Search of Humanity curator, Ai Weiwei’s intense engagement with antiquities and the idea of cultural goods as a sign of the past opened up new space for the artist to think about both historical existence and our present-day global way of living. In addition, Ai Weiwei was fascinated by the craftsmanship behind such objects—tables, stools, vessels. He drew on these cultural techniques as he continued his work with readymades from the 1980s, albeit now using valuable antiquities to create his own objects. Accordingly, he dispensed with nails and screws when he interlinked two tables from the Qing dynasty in Tables with Crossed Corners. With this defamiliarization and new construction of his objects out of selected historical pieces, the antiquities lost their functionality and became material for his sculptures. In this way, Ai Weiwei robbed them of their character as objects of use, but not of their link to the past.
Dieter Buchhart concludes that Ai Weiwei holds up a mirror to us, showing us our personal abysses and those of society today. Through his art, he tells us to commit ourselves to humanity.
This and much more can be discovered in the Albertina Modern retrospective as well as in the accompanying catalogue, which both span until Ai Weiwei’s present day works.
Ai Weiwei: In Search of Humanity. Edited by Dieter Buchhart, Elsy Lahner, Klaus Albrecht Schröder. With contributions by D. Buchhart, R. Buergel, E. Lahner, J. Tancock. Hirmer Publishers, 2022, 336 pages with 180 colour illustrations, 24 × 30 cm, hardcover. Order the English edition of this book from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this book review are not between quotation marks.
Book review added on June 1, 2022 at 15:55 Austrian time. Details added at 20:27.
