Review: Ai Weiwei at the Royal Academy (2015)

 

The main courtyard of the Royal Academy features a dozen dead trees. On closer inspection we find they have been manufactured from disarticulated logs and branches which have been bolted together. The effect is pleasingly surrealistic – a feature evident in the best works displayed inside.

For western art lovers Ai Weiwei has almost achieved sainthood. In his native country of China he has been imprisoned, beaten and hospitalised and had his studios reduced to rubble because of his calls for government transparency and his demands of freedom of speech. Consequently, he has reached the status of martyr or holy man. This rarified position makes it very difficult to critique his work because any negativity will seem churlish, given the very real suffering he has already experienced. Where does one begin to separate the artist from the dissident? Is this even possible? Dissidence is in his blood. When Ai was a baby his poet father was arrested and the family sent to a labour camp where for twenty years his father was forced to clean public toilets. Ai’s position as an activist is interdependent on his art. And his art is increasingly dependent on his position as an activist.

This is Ai’s first major retrospective in the UK. He is best known here for filling Tate Modern’s great turbine hall entrance with one-hundred-million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds. For the general public in London he is one of the most popular artists, and this exhibition is the most crowded I have experienced at the Royal Academy. The audience was hushed and reverent. The place felt almost like Lourdes. Many of the visitors trundled infants in pushchairs. One grandmother lifted a toddler from his stroller and actually sat him on a plinth next to Ai’s ‘Coca-Cola Vase’, as if it was a holy relic, whereupon the tot smeared a wet hand across its delicate surface. Guards were noticeably scarce in this room - perhaps in deference to the artist’s well-publicised struggle with such forces of containment - but I found myself wishing for one at this moment.

The exhibition, arranged across twelve large halls, contains key works from the artist’s career. The best works are mysterious and poetic, and there is much to admire about these. But there are some works that are dogmatic and preachy, which may serve as instructive sociopolitical objects but are less significant artistically and only reinforce the importance of Ai as a dissident, just in case any of the audience needed reminding. This includes two enormous halls covered in wallpaper featuring, respectively, golden handcuffs with surveillance cameras, and interlocking arms with hands giving the middle finger salute; which all seemed rather trite.

One of the first halls contains Ai’s pot works, where he has performed interventions upon ancient Chinese pottery. The aforementioned ‘Coca-Cola Vase’ (2014), one of several the artist has made over the last decade, is a powerful piece: a beautiful Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) vase ‘desecrated’ by having the lurid Coca-Cola signage painted upon it. The effect is shocking and multi-layered, referencing simultaneously: the Chinese government’s destruction of artifacts from its imperial past; the rise of a new kind of (capitalist) imperialism; and the larger questions of to whom does history belong? These ideas are extended to another piece in the room, ‘Coloured Vases’ (2006), in which fifteen Han Dynasty and Neolithic vases have been dipped in bright industrial paint. The effect is beautiful, and shocking. On the wall beside these works are the three large, well-known, black and white photographs, ‘Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn’ (1995), which show the artist doing just that.

Another hall contains furniture-based works. A table from the Qing Dynasty has its back broken and re-set to enable it to rest, half-upright, against a wall; another has had a circular hole cut into it, the exact dimensions of a wooden pillar from a dismantled temple which now plugs it; a Qing table with three legs crouches in a corner like a spider. A large work, ‘Grapes’ (2010) is comprised of fifteen three-legged Qing stools joined into a star-shape. All of these pieces share the surrealist glee of an object made pointless. They are full of mystery and of poetry. This sense is reinforced in the next smaller, dimly-lit room, where chunks and beams from a Qing Dynasty temple have been bolted together into a kind of pergola, the legs of which intersect with chairs and stools. It is a magical piece in which history and mythology intertwine.  

‘Straight’ (2008 – 2012) is a work about the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province, south-western China, in which more than 5,000 people - mainly students from the poorly, hastily-constructed schools - were killed.  Authorities refused to make public the names of the victims so Ai set up an online memorial blog, which was soon shut down. The work consists of 200 tonnes of rusty steel reinforcing poles which the artist salvaged from the wreckage. Each pole was straightened out and is here stacked in an enormous, undulating rectangle. The form describes the waving surface of the earth during an earthquake. On the walls flanking the piece are enormous charts with the names of the 5,000 dead. It is a sombre, dignified, poetic piece.

The next hall contains the work, ‘S.A.C.R.E.D. (2012). Six metal boxes are arranged in a grid. Each box has a small door. When one mounts a little step to peer into the viewing hole in the roof of each box, one finds a room with various grim scenes of Ai’s incarceration displayed, exactly as he remembered it. The rooms and everything in them are meticulously constructed at precisely half-actual size. The walls and all the furniture are wrapped in plastic; there are no windows. In each room, Ai is seen accompanied by two uniformed guards. We see Ai asleep on a cot, the guards standing beside him all night; here he is eating a meal, guards at his side; here he is sitting on a toilet, guards standing sentry. The images are without doubt horrible, and they do give one a sense of the claustrophobic horror of events. But these works do little more than document Ai’s situation: they are no more engaging than a display at Madame Tussaud’s.

Two good pieces in the next room are ‘Video Recorder’, and ‘Surveillance Camera’ (both 2010). It was strange to see those ubiquitous objects carved in marble, so that they possess a pristine beauty belying their sinister application. Also successful are the other objects presented in unfamiliar materials, such as a pair of handcuffs carved from jade, or a string of anal beads and a butt-plug, carved from the same material. All of these possess the surrealist quality of dislocating our perceptions. As does ‘A Ton of Tea’ (2011), which is a cubic-metre of compressed tea which sits on a little wooden palette. It resembles a giant Oxo cube.

Another cube, elsewhere, is more poignant. It is ‘Souvenir from Shanghai’ (2012). It consists of the rubble and smashed stones that Ai collected from the site of his demolished studio, painstakingly stacked into a solid block. It is a desperately sad work, and one feels the artist’s pain in every crumbled brick.