Ai Weiwei: Roots
2 Oct – 2 November 2019
www.lissongallery.com/exhibitions/ai-weiwei-roots
Ai Weiwei
A big exhibition by Ai Weiwei this autumn options a new series of monumental sculptural works in iron, solid from giant tree roots sourced in Brazil all through exploration and production for past year’s study exhibition, ‘Raiz’, at the Oscar Niemeyer-designed OCA Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo.
Ai labored with community artisans and communities throughout Brazil, viewing Trancoso in the east to track down roots and trunks from the endangered Pequi Vinagreiro tree, generally observed in the Bahian rainforest. Features of these rare tree roots, some of which could be about a thousand decades outdated, ended up painstakingly moulded, conjoined and then forged to make putting compositions and daring types that replicate their Brazilian heritage. Even though some resemble fantastic jungle beasts or fantastical creatures, this kind of as the 3- and four-legged operates Fly and Level, other people like Celebration and Martin (all 2019) consist of shattered, exploded root forms radiating outwards from a central nexus. The titles all came as tips from Ai Weiwei’s younger son Ai Lao, dependent on his private observations or connections produced when browsing these tree stays with his father, incorporating to the perception of surreal displacement and alien disjointedness in the exhibition. This incongruous atmosphere speaks further of the works’ depiction of the condition of ‘uprootedness’, a person that mirrors not only the artist’s peripatetic existence right after getting permitted to depart China in 2015, but also the plight of the refugees he has invested the very last few several years documenting, as effectively as the different indigenous populations that depend on the trees and forests of Brazil for their habitats and sustenance. The deforestation and concomitant purge of peoples and resources relates to prior bodies of operate manufactured by Ai and to the recent political realities of many countries, like his indigenous China.
The product used in creating the Roots collection – forged iron covered in a patina of orange rust – furthermore responds to ancient cultures and man’s first tools for tree felling and woodworking, fairly than to the the latest, extra polite art record of bronze or metal sculpture. Although originally contorted by their encompassing landscapes, these roots ended up not born of mother nature but built and crafted by human palms, using the historic procedures of ‘lost wax’ moulding and then iron casting. These procedures characterize a classic, mainly bygone way of existence that has been usurped and upended by industrialisation and relentless modernisation, illustrating how progress can normally arrive at the expense of cultural and societal effectively-getting.
Contrasting with these hefty, land-certain creatures is a quantity of floating figures, clouds and dream-like vignettes. Ai has been developing sensitive sculptures from stretched silk around bamboo armatures for the earlier five yrs, using a group of Chinese kite makers primarily based in Weifang, a city in Shandong province. Purported to have been invented in China all around 500 BC by a carpenter and a thinker, the kite has held numerous capabilities throughout historical past from measuring distances or wind speed, to interaction and navy utilization. Ai’s kites refer again to a mythological encyclopaedia of monsters and creatures regarded as Shan Hai Jing (the Vintage of Mountains and Seas) that also pre-dated Christianity, which depicts fantastical hybrids of chimera, gorgons, unicorns, dragons and griffins. Together with this bestiary, Ai has included individual and childhood symbols, as properly as references again to his have is effective – Surveillance Digital camera and his 1-fingered salutes, the Analyze of Standpoint series – and these of his influences, such as Marcel Duchamp and Vladimir Tatlin.
Finally, the demonstrate ends with a progress of Ai’s experimentation with LEGO bricks. These new wall-centered will work attribute politically-charged, pixelated renderings of the trajectory of a refugee boat refused docking at Lampedusa right after two weeks at sea, the entrance site of the Mueller report into Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election, as very well as a deconstructed symbol of the contentious protests of Tiananmen Sq. in 1989.
A new book, also entitled Roots – that includes contributions from nature author Robert Macfarlane the curator of ‘Raiz’, Marcello Dantas the Chair of Asian Art at the Museum of Fantastic Arts Boston, Christina Yu Yu Brazilian anthropologist Lilia Moritz Schwarcz between other folks – will be printed by Distanz on the event of this exhibition, which is presented in collaboration with Ai’s Berlin gallery, neugerriemschneider.
Posted by hateruma_yaeyama on 2019-10-02 10:41:32
Tagged: , Ai Weiwei , Lisson Gallery
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