Ai Weiwei, Lisson Gallery

With a major retrospective opening at the Brooklyn Museum, luckily for us, Lisson Gallery provide a closer location for an Ai Weiwei exhibition: London. 

Beijing born artist Ai Weiwei is back on British soil. Not physically, but artistically, with his latest Lisson Gallery exhibition from 23rd May – 19 July . Ai transforms familiar objects into works of art that are both socially engaged and aesthetically enticing. For Londoners he is best known for pouring hundreds of millions of handmade porcelain sunflower seeds onto the floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine hall back in 2010 . 

This show sees hand-carved copies of handcuffs, gas marks,  cosmetic bottles, even his father's chair, refashioned in alluring materials such as fine woods, marble, jade and glass. His gestures are grand and intimate at once, harnessing this paradox to explore the tensions of day-to-day life with perfected simplicity .

Cultural Rebel...

An activist, critical of censorship and corruption, Ai has become the international poster boy for freedom of expression in China; he has been the subject of much persecution by the authorities as a result. This reached fever-pitch 2011 when he ‘disappeared’. Following 81 days in detention, Ai was released unharmed, but today he is banned from leaving the country. Unsurprisingly then, his latest show speaks strongly out of and about China. 

A colossal sculpture of reconfigured stainless steel bicycles , stacked and melded in mesmerising geometric forms, sits as a striking centrepiece. Part of his 'Forever' series, they reference the famous brand of mass-manufactured bicycles, produced out of Shanghai since the 1940s. Ai reconsiders a vehicle that is dying out, choking under smog-emitting superhighways and the weight of unbridled urban development. These forms also pay homage to Duchamp and his revolutionary, ready-made wheel sculpture. Duchamp is a figure with whom Ai has found cerebral studentship, exploring the meaning latent in commonplace objects. 

Why Ai?

It is easy to feel fatigued by an inflated market for new Chinese art, with hollow 'contemporary chinoiserie'  demanding big bucks at auction. Often China’s complex history can get reduced to an aesthetic, and this can be a criticism directed at Ai Weiei. But his art is inseparable from the real constraints he faces and his celebrity is not hollow. Rather than resting on a trendy sense of ‘chineseness’, his work has the power to transcend imposed borders.