Page 50 - AI WEIWEI CAHIERS D ART

been the immemorial center for Chinese porcelain. There, Weiwei discovered that master potters trained in traditional methods, like Liu, could imitate any kind of ceramic ware, including the most refined porcelains of the Forbidden City (which he had Liu and his workers reproduce for Blue and White Porcelain (1997), a series of perfect imitations of famous vases from different periods of the Qing Dynasty (Yongzheng (1723–1735) and Qianlong (1738–1795)). Does that made them less good, or less valuable, and if so, why? In an interview in 2000, he offered this analysis: “Let’s say we place an exact copy in a museum setting; would this not completely confuse museum goers? Is it real or fake? How can a museum exhibit a modern reproduction as an authentic period piece? Does this not undermine the whole system?”11 In the slang he must have heard on the streets of New York, Ai Weiwei’s work continues its disingenuous demurral, “Just askin’.” And of course Jorge Luis Borges argued, in his short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Don Quixote,” that a later imitation must be infinitely more profound than its original, because it is achieved in the face of such added cultural weight.12
The work that garnered Ai Weiwei his first international attention was Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (see p. 34–35), the photographic sequence from 1995 that showed him holding, then dropping, a two-thousand-year-old vase. The third photograph in the series shows him standing immobile, with the same impassive expression, as the vessel lies shattered on the floor. His hands, however, betray his emotion. In the first photograph, they hold the vase with exquisite care. (In fact, he dropped two of them, because his brother’s new camera failed to capture the first event.)13
At the time, Weiwei’s stated motives for this performance ran in much the same groove as Duchamp’s cocky defiance: having a precise knowledge of the value of this ancient object, he seemed to suggest, granted him greater license than a less informed person to do whatever he liked with it.14 On the other hand, his ability to confound Western critics also lent the work some of its decisive punch: meekly playing right into his game, they argued over the value of the shattered vase as if its estimated price should determine its right to exist, with one critic finally justifying the drop by saying the vessel was “only” worth some $10,000 USD.15 Asked whether his works were “readymades” in the mold of Duchamp and Warhol, he shifted the discussion to an entirely different level by replying, “Duchamp had his bicycle seat. Warhol had an image of Mao. I have a totalitarian regime. It is my readymade.”16 Time and experience show that his motives in dropping the urn were probably far sharper and more complex than he could fathom when he let it slip from his grasp and consigned it to gravity; then, he could only act on instinct, and, he will now admit, a certain degree of immaturity.17 Those profound unstated motives help to explain why, unlike poor Maximo Caminero, the artist who threw one of Weiwei’s Colored Vases to the floor of the Perez Art Museum in Miami and earned a criminal charge, Ai Weiwei himself got away with his action. Besides, as he swiftly pointed out after Caminero’s gesture, he had actually owned the two vases he dropped before his brother’s camera, whereas Caminero was destroying another person’s property.
Some of the catalogue essays for a 2010 exhibition of Ai Weiwei’s ceramic works ventured to doubt that the dropped vase was a genuine antique.18 Only the photograph attests to its appearance, a shape without parallel among Neolithic pots. For a Red Guard, presumably, smashing a new vase would be a much greater sin than
smashing an old one; for an archaeologist, obviously, the reverse would be the case. But Ai Weiwei insisted from the outset that he himself had smashed nothing at all; the destruction of the Han dynasty vase, he claimed, was entirely due to gravity.
On the other hand, the artist has tended to observe a rigorous distinction between imitation of ancient or historical objects and direct intervention on those objects. In 1996, he indisputably took a hammer in hand and smashed two blue-and-white porcelain dragon bowls on film. Ostensibly, these dated from the reign of the Kangxi Emperor (1662–1722), who sponsored a wholesale revival of the ceramic industry in Jingdezhen.19 Nor can gravity bear the blame for another work, Dust to Dust (2008), a glass jar that contains (or is supposed to contain) the pulverized remains of yet another group of ancient vessels. On the other hand, 1996, the year of the smashed dragon bowls, was also the year in which Ai Weiwei exhibited the picture-perfect contemporary reproductions of Kangxi ware. What eye, however trained, can truly tell what dust is made of?
*
In fact, of course, Ai Weiwei, even in his days of smashing and daubing, cared passionately about the destruction of old China: its objects, its cities, its immemorial customs. Another work, Souvenir from Beijing (2002), presented a single brick from a demolished courtyard house in a beautiful wooden case constructed from the timbers of a demolished Qing temple, a memorial to the painstaking workmanship and simple beauties that once made up the dense texture of traditional Chinese life. As a child, he had grown up in a hutong, the typical northern Chinese alleyway that created a tight community by the very shape of the houses clustering around it, each with its own enclosed courtyard, each with its own pile of cabbage stacked against one wall, enough to carry a family safely through the winter.
More recent works have called similar attention to the disappearing rhythms of old China by singling out everyday objects, things once so common as to be almost invisible. Ai Weiwei reminds viewers of their quiet existence by transforming them or adapting them to new purposes, and above all, by playing on the immense numbers that four billion Chinese can muster on such a phenomenal scale. Every house once had its three-legged stools, constructed by careful joinery without the help of nails or glue. No two are exactly alike, but all are linked by a strong family resemblance. Now such mainstays of domesticity are disappearing, replaced by fancier places to sit. Ai Weiwei has transformed these commonplace artifacts into fantastic new constructions, like Grapes (2011), which exists in several versions: groups of stools from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) fitted together so that, legs outwards, they form a light, spiky, and captivating ball. As we admire Weiwei’s ingenuity, we can still admire the individual stools’ the clever design and confident execution of individual stools, small beauties to illuminate everyday life. Another installation, Stools (2014, see p. 100–101), tied a sea of stools together, more than 6,000 of them, to create a vast congregation. The stools themselves spanned four hundred years of Chinese history: Ming, Qing, and People’s Republic, all
42