AI WEIWEI’S

MOST FAMOUS
ARTWORKS
Daniele Rimondi
SUNFLOWER SEEDS
● London's Tate Modern is home to the Chinese artist Ai
Weiwei's Sunflower seeds.
● 100 million sunflower seeds reproduced in hand-decorated
porcelain.
● The process involves around 1,600 people in the city of
Jingdezhen.
● According to Ai Weiwei, seeds represent the unrepeatable
uniqueness of the individual faced with the alienation of the
mass
COLOURED VASES
● Exhibition visitors have expressed feelings of uneasiness or even pain and
nostalgia when seeing Colored Vases
● The 51 vases that make up the artwork are originally treasures from the Neolithic
Age (5000–3000 BCE)
● and the artist has dunked them in common industrial paint.
● By doing this, he commented on the devastation caused by the Chinese Cultural
Revolution and the disregard for centuries-old craftsmanship.
● By covering the surfaces, the history of the vases is no longer visible, but still there,
beneath the dried layer of industrial color.
● Like with many other works by Ai Weiwei, he uses irony to challenge viewers’
assumptions and perspectives.
STRAIGHT
● ai weiwei made headlines back in 2008 for his quest in recovering the truth
about the number of student casualties that were a result of the sichuan
earthquake that hit china
● the work is composed of 150 tons of steel rebar which the artist recovered
from the sites of the collapsed schools in sichuan following the quake.
● varying in diameter, ai weiwei has had all of the retrieved metal parts
straightened as if new, and has arranged them in stacks, creating an eerie
landscape which immediately brings forth a feeling of sameness in memory
of those whose lives were lost
● the action of adjusting the pieces in a way metaphorically speaking of the
artist trying to make things right.