Ai wei wei: Sunflower seeds; Canaletto and his Rivals
There are two ways to approach the vast silt of sunflower seed husks covering the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern – out of pure curiosity, knowing only that this is the work of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, or armed with cold hard facts.
The first (and I freely confess this was mine) begins with the strange visual lure, and with an almost animal desire to walk across what appears to be some kind of grey volcanic shore. You want to hear the husks crunch underfoot, to feel them shift, to gaze down at these millions of tiny particles irresistibly proposing broken shells or grains of sand on the beach.
Trampled, pocked, scuffed, they are (or at least, were, until health and safety suspended this pleasure on Thursday, due to anxieties over porcelain dust) constantly in motion yet too numerous to be altered by the tides of feet. And if you stand not upon them but before them, as is now your only option, they simultaneously resemble an ocean. Fathomless, numberless: each physical experience puts one in mind of time and tide, of infinite numbers of units, husks, people.
Perhaps you might reflect upon the artist’s nationality, on the difficulty of ever comprehending the sheer scale of China, of its remote and immense population. You might notice how the shingle seems to tinge the atmosphere grey, how sub-fusc the people look. Perhaps you think of Mao, of mass uniformity.
Or perhaps you notice how spectral the Turbine Hall has become, how this silver-grey sea neutralises the stark industrial void above, or how it doubles as an eerie stage-set. Perhaps you bend down and pick up a seed, discovering that it is both colder and heavier than expected, altogether more like gravel.
Whereupon, you consult the wall-text. It turns out that each seed is in fact a unique porcelain replica, hand-painted in Jingdezhen and fired at 1,300 degrees. Some 1,600 artisans worked for two years to make 100 million husks with a combined weight of 150 tonnes: a mass project, its collective spirit now abroad in London. The imagination runs fast from millions of tiny painted sculptures to thoughts of dismally repetitive labour.
Read more here at Guardian.
