He had hoped to come to Germany until the last moment. Alas, on Wednesday, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s largest solo exhibition to date opened at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau in his absence. Ai’s art can travel; he can’t. So he sent monumental installations, many of them new, by ship. Most galleries don’t have the space for a show of these dimensions. The exhibition of this superstar, who hasn’t been able to show in China for years, is a real coup for the Martin-Gropius-Bau, where Ai Weiwei’s work is sprawled across 18 rooms.
Dozens of surveillance cameras outside his Beijing studio monitor Ai. He has decorated them with red lanterns; marble replicas of those cameras now welcome visitors in the entry hall of the Martin-Gropius-Bau. They are made from the same marble Ai used to create miniature models of the Diaoyu Islands that Japan and China are currently disputing. Incidentally, the marble also came from the same quarry that the Chinese state had tapped for the construction of Mao’s mausoleum. In his “Study of Perspective” photographs, Ai gives the finger to famous edifices. The background of one picture includes Tiananmen Square, where government powers bloodily suppressed the peaceful protests of 1989. The Chinese government didn’t like that, and Ai keeps taunting and needling. The West celebrates the dissident; in Germany, he is one of the most popular contemporary artists.
Ai’s art is brazen, bold, and direct. “Evidence” is the title of his new exhibition; he says it’s about proving the truth. The fact that his work holds so much truth polarizes, and his critics accuse him of using the political situation to make a name for himself. But the 56-year-old is hardly so conceited. He created an entire body of work related to the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province in which tens of thousands were killed, including thousands of children who were buried under badly constructed school buildings. Ai investigated in spite of the government’s cover-up attempts: in Berlin, he’s exhibiting deformed steel reinforcements from the rubble of one of these schools. Straightened and piled up, the bars can also be seen as a metaphor for the corruption that pervades everyday Chinese life — the corruption for which China’s mushrooming cities offer a perfect breeding ground. Ai also had the Martin-Gropius-Bau’s gigantic atrium filled with a sea of wooden stools, some of which are more than 100 years old. Left behind in empty houses, they bear mute witness to China’s massive rural exodus.
In 1995, Ai denounced the death of cultural history in communist China with a legendary documented performance in which he smashed a precious Han Dynasty vase on the ground. A number of such 2,000-year-old receptacles are currently on display in Berlin; Ai has covered them with brightly colored car paint. As such, tradition is trapped under the shiny surface of the new Chinese capitalism that sets the tone for relations with the West. Just recently, President Xi Jiping signed a number of high-profile agreements in Berlin in front of the publicity cameras; while Germany and China intensify their economic relationship, the question of human rights remains the elephant in the room.
Ai Weiwei was arrested in 2011 and spent 81 days in a tiny cell, watched around the clock by two warders. He rebuilt the cell to scale. At Gropius-Bau, visitors can experience the claustrophobic atmosphere for themselves. Ai had his handcuffs reproduced in jade, a stone traditionally used for Chinese handicrafts. In another installation, numerous computers, hard drives, and telephones — all confiscated in searches — stand in neat rows. Ai’s work is quickly becoming more autobiographical.
The brightest spotlight of the exhibition and its exhaustive coverage — rarely has an art exhibition received so much front-page press in Germany — shines, once more, on the dissident rather than on the artist. Only a few early works from Ai’s time in New York, where he lived from 1981 to 1993, display his artistic roots. They are ready-mades in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, his great role model, among them “Suitcase for a Bachelor.” Ai was already packed for Berlin. In an interview he recently said he felt like one of those wooden stools: left behind.
“Ai Weiwei — Evidence” will be on display at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin through July 7.
