Ai Weiwei's bronze "Zodiac Heads" are the artist's personal interpretation of the 12 Chinese animal heads that represent the signs of the zodiac, which once decorated the Yuanming Yang imperial retreat in Beijing. Originally designed in the 18th century by a pair of European Jesuits, these sculptures were stolen in 1860 when the palace was ransacked by French and British troops. They are now priceless artefacts, coveted by international collectors, and have been popping up in Western auction houses. This prompted the artist to produce his own sculptural replicas, which combine Eastern and Western art in a single object and question ideas about authenticity and ownership. As he explains: "My work is always dealing with real or fake, authenticity, what the value is, and how the value relates to current political and social understandings and misunderstandings. I think there's a strong humorous aspect there," Ai explains. "I want this to be seen as an object that doesn't have a monumental quality, but rather is a funny piece people can relate to or interpret on many different levels, because everybody has a zodiac connection."
As a special commission, Ai has designed a series of wine labels for Donum based on the Circle of Animals, so that each vintage corresponds to the Chinese animal for that year, beginning with the Year of the Horse in 2014.
Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works. Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Originally poured into the interior of the Tate’s Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape.
During China's dynastic period, the production of porcelain at Jingdezhen was reserved exclusively for wares of the Imperial Court. The rise of porcelain production in the West in the seventeenth century spelled the decline of Jingdezhen in both wealth and official patronage. In creating a mock industry with this project, Ai references both a historically revered 'official' art form and contemporary mass produced goods. Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds) has become Ai Weiwei's most iconic and celebrated body of work.
Biography
Born in Beijing, Ai spent his childhood years in northwestern China, where his poet father Ai Qing was sentenced to years of hard labor during the Cultural Revolution. After Mao Zedong's death, the family settled in Beijing, where Ai Weiwei studied animation and founded an avant-garde art group. Feeling stifled in China, Ai set off for the U.S. in his early twenties, where he discovered the work of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, two artists who would greatly influence his subsequent career. Returning to China in 1993, Ai developed a fascination for historic Chinese art and architecture and their systematic destruction by the Communist government. He articulated that through caustic works that turned traditional Chinese artefacts into works of Pop or conceptual art. Increasingly critical of the Beijing government, he was arrested in 2011 and secretly detained for 81 days, an experience he transformed into a large-scale diorama installation exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Closer to home, his @Large exhibition on Alcatraz in 2014 also focussed on ideas of freedom, imprisonment and human rights. Ai now lives and works between Beijing and Berlin.