“My favorite exhibit has to be Spouts,” a visitor to Ai Weiwei: Making Sense exhibition at the Design Museum says to me earnestly, as we make our way through the space. “It really stops you in your tracks.” She gestures at the artwork: a pile of innumerable gray teapot spouts, placed on the ground to form a barren, dark field. Unconvinced that this is the most arresting exhibit in the room, I leaf through the guidebook to find the description. ‘Spouts, 2015. Porcelain. This field is made up of more than 250,000 porcelain spouts from teapots, crafted by hand during the Song dynasty (960 – 1279 AD).’
“You have to consider the context,” a nearby Design Museum employee enthuses, “I mean, don’t just see it as some amorphous mass of objects. When these teapots were being made a thousand years ago in China, if a piece wasn’t perfect at the end of the production process, the spout would be deliberately broken off and the whole teapot destroyed.” The spouts would end up in the soil, buried by the detritus of the centuries. When word got around that Ai Weiwei–dissident Chinese artist, architect and activist–was collecting them for his forthcoming exhibitions, farmers would offer him spouts they’d found in their fields. You can almost envisage a ninth century ceramicist scowling while inspecting the fruits of his labor, breaking and casting aside those that didn’t meet standards. Never once would it have occurred to him that one day his cast-off spouts would be viewed as items of historical significance in a design exhibition.
“It was very rewarding to see Weiwei respond to the context of the Design Museum,” said the museum’s chief curator, Justin McGuirk, when I asked him about the process of setting up the show. “I think the result is one of the most precisely framed exhibitions Weiwei has done in many years. It’s a show about how we make objects and landscapes, and how the values imbued in those things shift over time.”
The act of collecting is a recurring theme in Ai Weiwei’s work, and is valorised by the Making Sense exhibition, housed in leafy Kensington, west London. The chief curator spoke recently of how the act of collecting a particular object–be it postage stamps, vintage radios or even thousand year-old teapot spouts–can enhance the level of understanding about the item, as well as develop a sense of appreciation for its intrinsic value.
Since the 1990s, Weiwei has collected Lego pieces in order to construct artworks. At one point, 20 museums around the world were sending him lego bricks to facilitate this. Not only does collecting items magnify to the collector their innate merits, but collecting in itself can start a public feud. After the toy manufacturer stopped supplying bricks to Weiwei because he used the toys for political commentary, Weiwei publicly denounced Lego: “As a powerful corporation, Lego is an influential cultural and political actor in the globalized economy with questionable values.”
Ai Weiwei’s outspoken nature is also captured in his critiques on his own practice and artworks. Weiwei has insisted that he doesn’t like to look at his own collections, claiming that seeing them only serves to remind him of the cheerless nature of mass consumerism. “That’s why I don’t like to look at my works,” he explained in a recent interview for the Design Museum, “they make me dizzy, and normally I put them in the boxes.”
For many visitors present during my visit, the highlight of the exhibition was Water Lilies #1, Ai Weiwei’s take on one the most famous paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet. The work is over 15m in length–longer than a London double-decker bus–and spans an entire wall of the museum. Extraordinarily, the work is made entirely of Lego: we are told that it’s made up of 650,000 Lego bricks in total.
Ai Weiwei’s Water Lilies #1 is beautiful, in a way that is mesmerizing and a little unnerving. If viewed from a suitable distance, it does look Monet-esque–the wateriness of Monet’s water lily series is reflected in the pool-like variegated shades of blue. Up close, the illusion is shattered. Each piece of Lego is visible and together they are tightly bound in their plastic multitude. Step back from the artwork to enjoy it fully, noticing as you do, a shadow of a doorway in the middle of the work.
This shadow represents the underground dugout in Xinjiang province, northwest China, where the artist and his family lived in forced exile in the 1960s. There they would stay for five years–a literal hole in the ground with no running water or electricity. When we become aware of this, Water Lilies #1 gains new significance. It is not a Monet pastiche, nor is it a quirky gimmick; The artwork is really about the sense of being haunted by an early experience.
Water Lilies #1 can be seen as a moving tribute to Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing. Born in eastern China in 1910, Ai Qing would travel to Paris as a young man in the 1930s, training as a painter and becoming enamored of the art of the Impressionists (this would later inform his poetry). Initially siding with the Communists on his return to China, Ai Qing would fall victim to the ‘Anti-Rightist’ purge of intellectuals in 1957. His voice would be silenced for two decades but in 1976–the year of the death of Mao Zedong–Qing would make a resurgence and be hailed as a great national poet.
Like father, like son: Ai Weiwei would himself be censored, beaten, arrested and targeted by the Chinese government. One of the exhibits in Making Sense relates directly to this harrowing time. It is a mark of his resilience, and of his bravery, that the artist continued to speak out, primarily communicating through art. ‘My father loved Monet,’ Ai Weiwei has said, and it’s as though his father’s life has been made to come full circle within one artwork, from his youthful days admiring Monet’s paintings in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, to the solace of looking back, in old age, at what had been an extraordinary life.
As for the positioning of Water Lilies #1, it is a shame that more physical space is not allocated for the piece. It may span the length of the wall, but that’s no good to viewers if they have to step gingerly around its immediate neighbor, a very imposing installation entitled Through, to get a proper look. Ai himself acknowledges these constraints, saying in an interview that “this is only a small portion of what I have because the museum is not large enough.”
I asked Justin McGuirk whether the exhibition had changed the way in which he thought about beauty, be it the beauty of nature or the beauty of manufactured goods. “It hasn’t changed the way I think about beauty,” McGuirk responded, “but it makes me, and I hope our visitors, look at manmade objects with a renewed curiosity.”
“Weiwei is interested in the way designed forms continue to speak to us across generations or even thousands of years,” McGuirk elaborated, “even when we have forgotten how these objects were made and know very little about the cultures that produced them.”
If you visit the exhibition this summer, don’t look at the pieces with cynicism about contemporary art. Instead, imagine Ai Weiwei, a globally renowned artist in his sixties, as resolute and as vociferous as he ever was walking alongside the works with you. Imagine him stopping occasionally to bend down to reposition a single teapot spout in a sea of thousands. Perhaps, standing contemplatively among the beams of the salvaged ancient house that fills the lobby space (Coloured House, 2013): a piece of history saved from obliteration in both its physical presence and in its memory.
Cover photo: © Rick Pushinsky for the Design Museum.
[Written May 2023]
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