In spring, a significant new exhibition featuring works inspired by the Covid-19 epidemic will debut at the Design Museum in London, under the direction of the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. Three toilet paper sculptures, including two life-size rolls, one made of marble and the other of glass, will be on display. They represent the demand for everyday disposable items during the coronavirus epidemic.
The exhibition, which has been hailed as the first to see Ai’s work through the prism of architecture and design, also emphasizes the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the evolution of Beijing’s urban landscape over the previous three decades.
“(The show includes) things we think of as worthless in ordinary times, something as worthless as a toilet roll, which during the pandemic suddenly became precious… that for him was a real signal of how objects can gain and lose value depending on the context of our times,” said Justin McGuirk, the chief curator at the Design Museum and the exhibition curator, at an online press launch.
Crucially, he added, “we are not presenting Ai Weiwei as a designer and architect… (but) using his work and his thinking to reflect on design and architecture.”
The main focus of the exhibition is a collection of site-specific works, each of which consists of tens of thousands of objects organized in sections called “fields” on the gallery floor. These are pieces that Ai has recently gathered, including Lego bricks and tools from the Stone Age. The show will also include Ai’s largest work ever made out of Lego.
“This is a show about values; it is a meditation on cultural values and how they shift over time. It presents a history of making over thousands of years,” McGuirk said.
“When you collect so much… it tells you about human society,” Ai said at the launch.
One of the “fields,” entitled “Left Right Studio Material,” includes fragments from Ai’s porcelain sculptures that were destroyed when his Left Right studio complex in Beijing was demolished by the Chinese state in 2018. “They (the pieces) have a moral value,” Ai said.
After the firm briefly declined to provide him with materials for a politically-charged artwork in the aftermath of a 2014 show featuring Lego pictures of political prisoners, the artist received donations of bricks, which will be displayed in the “field” of Legos.
Another “field” includes 1,600 neglected neolithic stone tools which Ai started collecting in the 1990s at places such as flea markets. “Nobody paid attention to them… they (market vendors) were really surprised I wanted them,” Ai said.
Other fields cast a light on antique handcrafted works between the 200,000 porcelain spouts from teapots and wine ewers and the 100,000 porcelain exhibited balls next to them.
“We often say modern people do not know how to wash a dish,” Ai said. “In some senses, we are less understanding… about the touch, texture and shape of forms made by human hands.” The field sections in the exhibition will not be cordoned off to visitors, who will be able to walk freely between them.
The tension between handmade and industrially produced items underpins the show, added McGuirk, highlighting the period of turbulence and transition that China has gone through in the past 30 years.
Ai charts the changing face of Beijing following “the tremendous scale of urbanization and development which brought a lot of destruction, a devaluing of history, a wiping away of streetscapes and architecture,” McGuirk added.
Meanwhile the coffin-like “Rebar and Case,” references the earthquake that devastated Sichuan province in 2008, claiming almost 90,000 lives. More than 5,000 students were crushed under the rubble of their collapsed school buildings.
Ai’s new work “Nian Nian” consists of 26 prints representing more than 1,000 names hand-carved in a jade seal using calligraphy, creating a graphic memorial to the children who died.
Some works will be shown outside the exhibition space, including “Coloured House,” the timber frame of a house that once belonged to a family in Zhejiang province in eastern China during the early Qing dynasty.
“The loss of cultural memory is very much one of the themes of this show… Ai is bringing ancient and modern together,” McGuirk said.
