Ai Weiwei: Designed to provoke

* Exhibition photograph: Ed Reeve *

Daniel Nelson

A huge snake extends across the wall. Pleasingly colourful. But look closer. There’s another element: the serpent is made of scores of life vests.

It’s typical Ai Weiwei. It’s an artwork, but it’s also a marker of solidarity with refugees risking their lives to flee to safety.

Almost all his works have this element of politics, protest, solidarity, commitment.

The exhibition at London’s Design Museum, Ai Weiwei: Making Sense, seems nervous about spelling it out. The introductory blurb avoids statements, preferring the curatorial safety of asking questions: “How do we make sense of them [Ai Weiwei’s objects]? Is this a classic tale of technical progress, or have we lost crucial qualities with the march of time? Are they made by hand or machine? Are they priceless or worthless?”

All valid questions. His eclectic interests range from layers of history going back thousands of years to plastic moulded bricks, and we inevitably wonder about the art of making and lost skills. But the reality is that the art here is rooted in activism. “I never make a work just for beauty,” he has said. “It’s always for the connections.”

Take Water Lilies #1, a 650,000 Lego brick recreation of Claude Monet’s famous painting. Yes, the Impressionist’s brushstrokes have been replaced by an extraordinary representation of a depersonalised language of industrial parts and colours, but what really fascinates the punters - including me - is a dark spot that we are told is the door to an underground dugout in Xinjiang province where Ai Weiwei and his father lived in forced exile in the 1960s. The Chinese state’s intolerant, fearful, vindictive treatment of father and son in two different eras is ever-present in Ai’s work.

Several works, such as the installation involving thousands of fragments of Ai’s porcelain sculptures destroyed when the government demolished his Beijing studio in 2018, are about his own struggle against the state. More obvious are the photographs showing him giving the finger to landmarks like Trump Tower and Tianmen Square.

Others are less personal, more generalised attacks on the corruption that led to the collapse of sub-standard school buildings that killed thousands of children in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

There are other influences, too, in the work of this eclectic artist/activist, including his passion for collecting and rearranging. One of the most fascinating is the “field” of 4,000 Stone Age tools, obtained in a period when these left-overs of humanity held virtually no value in China. Another is the field of porcelain Song dynasty cannon balls.

Ai’ Weiwei’s fertile mind means there is a great variety in the show, a plethora of ideas, unexpected links and stimulating juxtapositions and a sense of fun. Inevitably there are hits and misses in terms of impact. It will attract big audiences, because it’s entertaining and provocative. No wonder authority everywhere dislikes and regards him warily: his eye might fall next on one of their policies and activities, and as night follows day a smashed pot, a piece of twisted metal, a refashioned artefact will undermine the Newspeak and mock the pretention, propaganda and complacency.

* Ai Weiwei: Making Sense, £16.80, 11-15-year-olds from £8.25, under-11s free, concession/students from £12.50, is at the Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High Street, W8, until 30 July, Info: designmuseum.org

• To coincide with the exhibition, Avant Arte, the curated marketplace that makes discovering and owning art radically more accessible, is collaborating with Ai Weiwei to make his work available to all in support of the Design Museum. The partnership encompasses Middle Finger, a new interactive online work by Ai Weiwei and a series of limited editions.  

Middle Finger invites people to submit their own perspective on power by ‘flipping the bird’ to a location of their choice, recalling Ai’s seminal work, Study of Perspective. Since launching 16 March 2023, the work has received over 15,000 global submissions and will remain open for all to take part for the duration of Ai Weiwei: Making Sense. The money raised from this partnership will go towards supporting the Design Museum’s future work, helping it to carry out its mission to champion design and designers, and to make the impact of design visible to all.

Tim Marlow, Director and CEO of the Design Museum, said:  

“Ai Weiwei is one of the most compelling artists and activists working today, but his practice is profoundly pluralistic, encompassing film, architecture, design and collecting. This exhibition is, therefore, long overdue and I’m proud that the Design Museum is the first institution to frame the work of Ai Weiwei through the lens of architecture and design and to collaborate in new ways with one of the great creative forces of the 21st century to date.”