While on our honeymoon in Tokyo, Japan this past October, Dean and I were fortunate enough to visit the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi Hills, where Ai Weiwei's largest solo exhibition entitled 'According to What?' was being shown. To be honest, I hadn't heard of the Chinese Contemporary Artist/Architectural Designer/Bad Ass Activist before then. 'According to What?', a title which was derived from a painting by Jasper Johns, featured 26 of Ai's works made since the 1990s, including six which were made specifically for the exhibition. The exhibition was organized into three sections: 'Fundamental Forms and Volumes', 'Structure and Craftsmanship' and 'Reforming and Inheriting Tradition', exploring the connections between Ai's work and its artistic, cultural and historical backgrounds. We were amazed at his works of art and really enjoyed the entire exhibition. Here are a few photos I took while I was there:
I was particularly drawn to his piece entitled "Snake Ceiling" (pictured above).
Snake Ceiling l 2009
Approximately ninety thousand people were killed or went missing in the May 12, 2008, Sichuan Earthquake. Many school buildings collapsed in the quake, killing many children and leaving their backpacks scattered across the quake areas. This work is a serpentine row of students’ backpacks laid out as a requiem for the souls of the children who died in the disaster. These characteristic backpacks in various sizes, for both elementary and junior high students, form a giant snake hanging from the ceiling.
Something about that piece really made an impression on me... so much that I decided to do a paper on it for my Art class. While researching Snake Ceiling for my paper, I learned about the "Sichuan Earthquake Names Project", Ai Weiwei’s guerrilla investigation. ARTINFO had some very interesting details about it in an article:
“To protect the right of expression is the central part of an artist's activity. ... In China many essential rights are lacking, and I wanted to remind people of this,” Ai told ARTINFO in a conversation at the Mori Art Museum.
Using his widely read blog as a platform (he has 17 million readers, he says), he charged that the high number of school fatalities was due to local officials siphoning money from school building costs. Grieving families said the structures were badly built and collapsed easily during the quake. But officials refused to list the names of the dead students, which could be used to unveil a possible cover-up, so Ai formed the Sichuan Earthquake Names Project with researchers and volunteers who discovered the names of 5,190 students. (The official government figure became 5,335, possibly thanks to pressure from Ai’s campaign.)
According to the project’s findings, some 3,500 (80 percent) of the students perished in 18 of the 14,000 damaged schools, a result that supports Ai’s theory about a building scandal. His blog posts were systematically censored or deleted throughout his investigation. On May 26-28 he wrote about being followed and about unknown persons visiting his mother’s house. On May 29 his blog was shut down.
“They shut us down because we were too active, so much heat, everybody coming into the discussions. We caused an Internet riot,” he says. “Even after 30 years of opening up with such an economic boom, the government doesn’t want to change the political structure. There are so many hidden problems — corruption, total loss of ideology, the tendency of the judicial system to stick to party lines. There’s no fairness or justice.”
Crazy stuff! Read the full article here!
p.s. I want to go back to Japan...
Photos taken with my Canon 5d Mark II
50mm f/1/4
15mm Fisheye f/2.8
