Page 54 - AI WEIWEI CAHIERS D ART

and all twelve spat in unison at noon. Seven of the twelve heads were known to have survived the looting of the Yuanmingyuan in 1860, and occasionally appeared on the art market, but with the auction of 2009, the Chinese government decided to insist on their repatriation. An advisor to China’s National Treasures Fund, Cai Mingchao, won the auction for twenty-eight million euros but then refused to pay, declaring that he had bid on principle for what in fact was illegal plunder.26 Bergé retorted in a radio interview that he would happily give up the heads on three conditions:
“All [the Chinese] have to do is to declare they are going to apply human rights, give the Tibetans back their freedom and agree to accept the Dalai Lama on their territory. If they do that, I would be very happy to go myself and bring these two Chinese heads to put them in the Summer Palace in Beijing.“27
The ensuing debate was perfect territory for Ai Weiwei and his love of conceptual puzzles: to what extent were the works to be considered treasures, or Chinese, or, for that matter, art? The subject matter was thoroughly and immemorially Chinese. The Qing emperor who commissioned the work belonged to a Manchu dynasty, and the designers had been born in Europe, but by the time they undertook the project they were all longtime residents of Beijing; the Emperor had been born there. The metalworkers who executed Castiglione’s design were probably Chinese, and likely to have put their touch on the works. To be sure, the animals were “only” decorative waterspouts, but did that disqualify them as art if Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome was art beyond a doubt? The fountain merged Chinese and European acumen in a perfect fusion, and the people who saw it in action, no matter who they were and what their culture, had all been charmed by the spectacle.
Ai Weiwei registered all the discussions, but above all what he saw in the two heads was a perfect subject for public art: if he executed a complete series of Zodiac heads, the display would be extensive and lively enough to capture attention, children would love the animals no matter what they meant, and the charm of the figures might spark curiosity about their meaning. He would also have to recreate the five missing heads, so that creativity would intersect intriguingly with archaeology. Unlike an archaeologist, however, he had no need to be accurate, only effective.
Eventually he cast a series of Zodiac heads in gold at the same scale as the originals, and another, much larger series in bronze, with the gold heads designed to be exhibited in a gallery and the bronzes outdoors. The bronze version of Circle of Animals (2011) made its début in New York in 2011, to precisely the effect Ai Weiwei had anticipated. Children loved the animals, and the general public was inspired to learn more about Chinese views of time-reckoning and the universe.28 As Circle of Animals toured the world, the rat and rabbit that had started it all returned to China, entering the collections of the National Museum in 2013.29 Chinese policy in Tibet remained as it was, and the Dalai Lama remains an exiled from his native country.
Recently, Ai Weiwei reprised his Circle of Animals in two dimensions, using LEGO blocks to obtain the pixelated quality of digital images and the consistent anonymity of industrially produced
plastic blocks. One version, Zodiac (2018), frames the heads with the bright, almost complementary colors and simulated drips of his Colored Vases. An earlier, larger series, also called Zodiac, also from 2018, uses backgrounds selected from the Studies of Perspective, but with Zodiac animals replacing the artist’s middle finger as the center of the composition. The Snake poses in front of the Colosseum. And Ai Weiwei’s choice for the background of the Dragon combines one Beijing Study of Perspective with a cartoon version of another photograph showing Ai Weiwei, posing before the Gate of Heavenly Peace at Tiananmen Square with his denim shirt open to show the word FUCK stenciled across his chest, a reference not only to his feelings about the violent repression of student protests in the same Square in 1989, but also to a notorious exhibition he co-curated in Shanghai in 2000—before it was shut down by the police. The English title of the exhibition and its catalogue was FUCK OFF; in Chinese the title was: “Uncooperative Attitude.” One wonders what Giuseppe Castiglione, the designer of those twelve original Zodiac heads, would make of their strange journeys in the past three centuries.
The Zodiac animals also feature in another of Weiwei’s most recent works, Life Cycle, the centerpiece of an exhibition in September 2018 at the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles (see p. 54–55). Ai Weiwei had already used his immense influence to address the global plight of refugees in his film, Human Flow (2017), and Law of the Journey (2017) a giant inflatable life raft of black PVC rubber, imitating the rafts that have taken so many African and Middle Eastern refugees across the Mediterranean.30 The passengers are 258 abstract human figures, the color of their skin, their gender, their clothing, their nationality all erased as inessential details. Life Cycle (2018) presents another life raft, but now it is a delicate structure made from withes of bamboo by the expert kitemakers of Weifang in Shandong province. Ai Weiwei has replaced some of the faceless passengers of Law of the Journey with bamboo figures of exceptional dignity and elegance: the heads of Chinese Zodiac animals on human bodies and, from the realm of archaeology, Queen Nefertiti, who sits at the back of the raft cradling a baby as so many mothers have done on these inadequate vessels in harsh seas. Rather than calling attention to the refugees’ misery, however, Life Cycle accentuates their nobility. Around the pedestal that supports the life raft Weiwei has ranged a series of quotations. Among them, a passage from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, composed some four thousand years ago (2100 BCE) and committed in cuneiform script to ceramic tablets, may provide the most essential clue to this installation:
There is the house whose people sit in darkness; Dust is their food and clay their meat.
I entered the house of dust
And I saw the kings of the earth.
*
The artists and archaeologists Anne and Patrick Poirier (both 1942–) certainly grew up in the house where people sit in darkness:
46