Ai Weiwei. Works 2004-2007

Présentation
Sous la direction d’Urs Meile
Ai Weiwei. Works 2004-2007

Ai Weiwei, né en 1957 à Pekin, est un artiste majeur de la scène artistique en Chine. Son travail confronte la culture chinoise et ses références historiques au contexte socio-économique contemporain et à ses paradoxes. Ai Weiwei est également architecte, commissaire d’exposition et critique d’art.

Extrait de «Chairs and visitors» par Philip Tinari

«When Ai Weiwei’s first Beijing decade drew to a close in 2003, it was already clear how the period would be narrated. And in the intervening four years, his story has been recounted often, becoming a « fairytale » in its own right. Many are the newspaper and magazine accounts telling us how he moved upon his return from a decade in New York, first to the side of what would prove his sick father’s deathbed, through a dialogue with the eager young artists of Beijing’s own « East Village », past a long series of trips to the antique markets and work on underground publications, into the oppositional stance of the Fuck Off exhibition in millennial Shanghai, and finally to a studio home on what were once the far north-eastern fringes of Beijing.

It is a happy, even heroic story of a once wayward son who finds his way back and then, drawing on what he saw while away, begins to make things and take positions that both reflect and complicate the material and aesthetic circumstances in which he once again found himself.»