Ai Weiwei: destroying ancient art in the name of art
Ai Weiwei has generational links to artistry and exile. His father, poet Ai Qing, was hounded by the Chinese communist government, and when Weiwei was only two years old, the entire family was exiled to the Gobi desert to punish his father. Weiwei inherited his father’s creativity, going on to produce his own subversive art that saw him equally hounded by the Chinese authorities. His entire body of work is a powerful endorsement of freedom and autonomy, which he illustrated most simply by smashing a cultural artefact.
His 1995 piece, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, became one of his most shocking. Loaded with social commentary, the simple act of destruction gave way to creation – of shards of broken urn in one sense, but more importantly, in conversations about power and who it belonged to. The urn was a 2,000-year-old ceremonial piece Weiwei called a “cultural readymade”. It was a Marcel Duchamp reference, whose own “readymades” were conventional objects, as the urn was, somehow recontextualised to create an artistic statement.
The urn had significant cultural and commercial value, both of which were redundant after being smashed to the floor. Weiwei suggested: “It’s powerful only because someone thinks it’s powerful and invests value in the object”. In destroying it, all its associated symbolism with the great Han Dynasty’s defining period was too.
Some cultural commentators were horrified, which Weiwei expected and countered with ease. “Chairman Mao used to tell us that we can only build a new world if we destroy the old one” was one choice rebuttal. Weiwei was referencing Mao’s own destruction during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which was coupled with the instruction that to build a new society, old cultural habits and ideas must be destroyed.
In the photo stills of the smashing, Weiwei himself was challenging societal values, letting go of the idea of value and pouring importance into individual sentiments by way of reclaiming power. His consistently bold artwork led to a dubious 2011 arrest. While he’d been previously thought of as such a high-profile artist he was “untouchable”, Human Rights Watch considered his eventual arrest a pointed message that the government had ultimate power.
Horrified by the suppression of his voice, several international groups and galleries called for his freedom, while Chinese state-sanctioned media called him a “deviant” and painted him as a troublemaking provocateur. Up until 2015, he lived under heavy surveillance and threat of arrest. He continued to criticise the government in his work and refused to be silenced. He has since shared that he was almost proud of experiencing the same detention his father did and, following in his footsteps, is now considered one of the most prolific artists and activists to emerge out of Chinese corruption.
