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The repeated characters read 'peace'. The pieces do not neatly relate to the provinces but are of more uniform size.
Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, Château La Coste
Vernissage de l'exposition " Mountains and Seas" Ai Weiwei (8 avril/17 juin 2017)
Stools (2013), comprising 5,929 wooden stools from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties and the Republican period, gathered from villages across northern China. The accumulation of individual stools forms a 72-foot square, creating an enormous variegated surface. Very few of these stools remain in Chinese households today, but they were once a ubiquitous staple of domestic life. Each stool reveals traces of use and evokes the experience of generations of lives. Ai Weiwei admires the stools for their simple design and solid structure, a design language that remained unchanged for thousands of years.
About the exhibition
Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique. However realistic they may seem, these life-sized sunflower seed husks are in fact intricately hand-crafted in porcelain.
Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands. Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape.
Porcelain is almost synonymous with China and, to make this work, Ai Weiwei has manipulated traditional methods of crafting what has historically been one of China’s most prized exports. Sunflower Seeds invites us to look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today.
Source: Tate Modern website
Through, 2008 - a combination of architecture and furniture from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). The wooden pillars and furniture are literally merged into a new kind of whole.
Ai Weiwei is one of the most significant and recognised artists working today..
This exhibition, developed in collaboration with the artist, is the first to present his work as a commentary on design and what it reveals about our changing values. Through his engagement with material culture, Ai explores the tension between past and present, hand and machine, precious and worthless, construction and destruction.
The exhibition draws on Ai's fascination with historical Chinese artefacts, placing their traditional craftsmanship in dialogue with the more recent history of demolition and urban development in China.
Divina Proportione (2010) and F-Size (2011) were inspired by a toy that Ai’s studio cats loved to play with. After completing these works, Ai discovered an illustration by Leonardo da Vinci for a mathematical treatise written by Luca Pacioli in 1497. One of da Vinci’s drawings is a “sphere” made from squares and triangles. The inspiration for Ai’s form is a fusion of High Renaissance genius with a contemporary plastic toy. The works in this series are made without nails or screws, using only advanced woodworking techniques perfected during the Ming Dynasty. The resulting objects blend methods, materials, functions and histories. Their identity is ambiguous, belonging to both contemporary and ancient times, representing societal changes as humanity evolves and old traditions disappear.