Ai Weiwei, Lisson Gallery - exhibition review
Ai Weiwei's activism and his 2011 detention by the Chinese state have made him one of the world's best-known artists but can you picture his work? Google him, and his portrait, not his art, dominates the images that appear.
This is a useful reminder that he’s a top conceptual artist, with a knack for finding a potent balance between a striking and often enigmatic image or object and hard-hitting social and political themes.
The works draw us into Ai’s daily existence and the wider situation in China. Sculptures made from clusters of bicycles, fixed together to form grand shapes, are archetypal Ai. They’re a nod to Marcel Duchamp, whose Bicycle Wheel (1913) was the first “readymade” — the birth of conceptualism. But also the bikes were an intimate form of transport around China before the recent boom in private cars.
This isn’t mere nostalgia because that car boom has added to Beijing’s pollution crisis, a phenomenon acknowledged by Ai when he donned a gas mask in a Twitter selfie last year. Here, two such masks appear on slabs, carved immaculately from single pieces of marble. They’re like skulls in old vanitas paintings, ominous portents of mortality.
Other works are more personal still: a pair of sagging armchairs, again carved from marble, depict the chair Ai’s poet father, himself a political prisoner, would sit in; handcuffs wrought in jade or formed from rare huali wood refer to Ai’s detention, as do coat hangers in stainless steel, wood and crystal — hangers were the only luxury he was afforded when incarcerated.
It’s as if Ai is gently taunting the Chinese authorities. He’s recently begun marking each of the surveillance cameras (there are more than 20) that surround his studio with naff Chinese lanterns. On Lisson’s floor are delicately honed marble versions of them, which resemble ancient Chinese pots.
Ai’s movements may still be restricted but his message — of confronting injustice and showing resistance in the face of adversity — continues to reach us.
Until July 19 (020 7724 2739, lissongallery.com)
