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and British troops, a casualty of the Second Opium War. The eighteen surviving pavilions were destroyed by fire in the Boxer Rebellion and the subsequent fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912; the Cultural Revolution inflicted further damage. Today, the durable stones of the Western Mansions, where Ai Weiwei stands in his 1977 photograph, are the best-preserved structures on the site; only three hundred years old, they have already suffered enough to seem as ancient as Rome or Palmyra.
Shortly after he was photographed at the Yuanmingyuan, Ai Weiwei, disillusioned by events in China, moved to the United States, where he would spend more than a decade (1981–1993). For a brief period he attended Parsons School of Design, but gravitated more eagerly to Greenwich Village, supporting himself by drawing portraits of tourists (the man can draw!) as he absorbed the challenges posed to art by figures like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, the two artists he has mentioned as significant influences on his own activity. These challenges ranged from the use of readymade objects to mass production to broadened ideas of what constituted a work of art. He began to create his own assemblages of delicately crafted objects, fitting one violin into a pair of tennis shoes (Violin with a Pair of Shoes, 1985), giving another a shovel handle rather than a bridge (Violin, 1985), and balancing a violin bow across a wok with Zen-like austerity (Wok with Bow, 1986).
In 1993, as Ai Qing’s health deteriorated further (he passed away in 1996), Weiwei returned to a rapidly changing, profoundly altered China. In Beijing, whole neighborhoods of traditional alleys (hutong) and gray brick courtyard houses had been razed to make room for skyscrapers of concrete and glass. The slatted wooden houses of Shanghai, ideally suited to the city’s torrid climate, had been replaced by cement palaces and climate control. In city markets, every remnant of the past could be found for sale, from battered spittoons and opium pipes to gorgeous furniture, embroidered silks, and prehistoric pots. And alongside the real remnants, if sales were good, contemporary ingenuity ensured a bounteous supply of clever imitations.
Ai Qing had been a connoisseur of porcelain, committed enough to maintain a small collection even in the harsh conditions of the labor camp. Ai Weiwei was introduced to the antiques markets of capitalist Beijing by his half-brother, painter Ai Xuan, who had become a devoted student and collector of antiques. The Cultural Revolution may have destroyed countless relics of China’s past, but discerning buyers could still find a host of treasures. Weiwei himself has said that he visited the antique market almost every single day between 1993 and 1996, seeing, touching, and learning what he could.8
Ai Weiwei responded to this brave new world with the same kind of impudent bravado he admired in the modern artists of the West. Not long after his return to Beijing, he dipped a brush in garishly colored paint and wrote “Coca-Cola” across the surface of one of the Han dynasty urns he had bought during his expeditions to the antiques market, careful to use the American soft drink’s distinctive cursive script, matching its looping curves to the graceful, sinuous (and much finer) decorations the ancient potter had applied to the original work. He called the results of this first operation Han Dynasty Urn with Coca Cola Logo (1993, see p. 39). Coca- Cola’s aggressive advertising campaign of 1983 was the first of its kind in China after the death of Mao Zedong, and at the time, the
government denounced its “American-style commercialism.”9 For once, Weiwei seems to have agreed. He followed this first repainted urn with other versions, which he called Coca Cola Vases. Other Colored Vases (2006) have simply been dipped in loud, viscous industrial paint, the crudity of their color bath often providing a stark contrast to the delicate decoration of the original pots. Ai Weiwei’s stated purpose for this pointed roughing-up was to call a whole series of cultural assumptions into question, both Chinese and Western. If the vases had value, why were they selling so cheaply? What did his own interventions do to that perceived value? What did they say about the differences between crude modernity and antique refinement? What did mass production mean in Chinese antiquity—when many of these pots, for all their delicate beauty, were ordinary kitchenware—and what did mass production mean in the Chinese present, when the masses numbered in the billions and comprised the most populous nation on earth?
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Ai Weiwei’s own career has provided some provocative responses to his own ruminations. When he painted his first Coca Cola Vase in 1993, the added value of his own intervention was debatable. When he later produced a whole series of Coca Cola Vases, this time no longer painting them himself, their value had increased significantly because of their connection with his name, despite the fact that everything about them could be classified as an imitation: of the first Coca Cola Vase, of Ai Weiwei’s painterly hand, of the Coca-Cola logo. However, they are also originals by any standard: each vase is still selected by the artist himself, decorated in colors of his choice, with the script applied according to his specifications, and released as a new Coca Cola Vase only upon his approval. When a disgruntled Miami artist smashed one of Weiwei’s Colored Vases in 2014, news reports estimated the object’s value at a million dollars. One outraged headline describes the damaged vessel as an “Ancient Ai Weiwei Vase,” a paradox that he himself would certainly have enjoyed.10 Maximo Caminero, the protester, was charged with criminal mischief.
How did this incident affect the value of the Colored Vase? For an archaeologist, a pot that has been broken and patched is just as precious as one that is found intact; the pot’s importance lies in the information it provides, and the professional sifters of ruins have long since learned to grasp beauty from fragments. For a collector or a museum curator, an intact pot has far greater worth than a broken one. For an ancient Athenian, a broken pot was useless, except for writing notes (as note paper did not exist) or, in the city’s governing Assembly, for inscribing the names of candidates for ostracism, the form of banishment that took its name from ostrakon, the Greek word for potsherd. Modern restorers could glue together Ai Weiwei’s shattered Colored Vase so cleverly that almost no one would notice that it had ever been broken. Furthermore, the patched Colored Vase has a story. Is that not worth something too?
From the outset, moreover, Ai Weiwei’s ceramic works also played wickedly with the idea of authenticity. In the antique markets of Beijing, he met the potter and collector Liu Weiwei, who introduced him to Jingdezhen, in the province of Jiangxi that has
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