Spouts, Ai Weiwei (2023) (EMPIRE LINES x Design Museum)

Design Museum curator Rachel Hajek makes sense of Ai Weiwei’s ‘fields’ of found objects, from ancient Chinese porcelain to Lego bricks, and how the contemporary artist’s fascination with the history of making is itself making history.

One of the world’s most well-known living artists and activists, Ai Weiwei works across disciplines, from film and sculpture, to collection, curation, and archealogical excavation. But Making Sense is his first exhibition to focus on design and architecture, and how traditional crafts and artefacts can help us re/consider what we value today. One of Weiwei’s ‘fields’ of found objects features over 200,000 hand-crafted porcelain spouts from Song dynasty China, their sheer quantity a testament to the scale of mass-production in Asia, many centuries before the Industrial Revolution.

Curator Rachel Hajek digs into Weiwei’s practice and politics, exploring tensions between the minor and the monumental, construction and destruction, and past and present. Plus, how the artist reimagines ‘Western masterpieces’ like Claude Monet’s Waterlilies with LEGO. to articulate his relationships with his father, a poet subjugated during the Cultural Revolution, and the Chinese state today.

Ai Weiwei: Making Sense runs at the Design Museum in London until 30 July 2023.

For more, read my article in gowithYamo: https://www.gowithyamo.com/blog/making-sense-ai-weiwei-at-the-design-museum

WITH: Rachel Hajek, Assistant Curator at the Design Museum, and a curator of Making Sense.

ART: ‘Spouts, Ai Weiwei (2023)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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