I came across the Ai Wei Wei 'Forever' Sculpture, located outside The Gherkin. Quite an impressive sculpture made up of stainless steel bicycles. Its designed to be able to expand up to 3000 but I'm not sure how many were in this - quite a few and gave an amazing effect when looked at square on....


October 2015 by 11 for UAA, on Flickr


October 2015 by 11 for UAA, on Flickr


October 2015 by 11 for UAA, on Flickr


October 2015 by 11 for UAA, on Flickr

[HASH]aiweiwei

Watched a good documentary about this show on Sky Arts last night - definitely worth a watch, probably available to view on catch up

You may or may not know this but their is a fourth and fifth image that is always missing from the "vase dropping" triptych, the fourth show's me diving into the shot and failing to catch the falling vase, the fifth one show's me kicking the fu## out of Weiwei for destroying such a lovely pot.....the bastard did it on purpose as well!!!!!

your welcome xx

I'll focus on the above installation to offer additional information.

With Ai Weiwei's work generally, context and intent are so crucial that it feels criminal for them to be excluded. This may have been the reason the audio guides were complimentary (a rarity) at the Royal Academy retrospective. One could appreciate the show far more by listening to just some of the background on key pieces. After my friend and I finished our visit, we felt duty-bound to pass on our audio guides to a couple who were walking around without them.

The previous Ai exhibition I'd attended was the impressive survey at both London spaces of Lisson Gallery in 2011. [This was shortly after the artist was detained by the Chinese authorities and disappeared — nobody then knowing where he was, or even if he still was. His incarceration would last 81 days.]

Straight was first shown in 2012, so I'd never seen it before in person. A pivotal version was presented at Zuecca Project Space at the time of the 2013 Venice Biennale, but much smaller (38-ton) incarnations were also part of the North American 2012-14 touring exhibition, Ai Weiwei: According to What?, in Washington, D.C., Indianapolis, Toronto, Miami and New York.

It is a remarkable work: politically-charged and relevant; conceptually brilliant; painstaking and truly committed in its execution; visually powerful; and very moving.

There follows three press excerpts about the installation, and extra photos from various named sources.

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Sam Phillips article (a recommended read) in RA Magazine:

The largest gallery in the RA exhibition focuses on Ai’s art in response to Sichuan. As well as displaying the names of the students who died, and photographs of the destruction the earthquake wrought, the artist has installed Straight (2008-12, [...]), a monumental floor-based sculpture formed from 90 tons of steel rebars found at the site. The thousands of rods had once held up buildings, before being twisted and mangled in the force of the quake. Ai employed labourers to straighten them by hand by striking each one up to 200 times. These have been aligned across the gallery in a shape like a giant seismogram. He has said that the materials for this sculpture are “history, individual stories, blood, tears and labour”.




Images: London Evening Standard

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Financial Times:

Assembled from rusty steel poles that ripple across the floor like folds in an ancient landscape or a seabed, “Straight” is a solemn and exquisite sculpture even if you are ignorant of its inspiration. Only an artist with a great gift for material and proportion could have blessed those rigid elements with such organic fluidity.

But Ai Weiwei has never been one to shrink before apparently unassailable forces, as the story behind “Straight” reminds us. In May 2008, 90,000 people were killed when an earthquake hit the Sichuan province of south-western China. When the authorities refused to make public the identities of the dead, Ai created an online memorial. His blog was shut down by the government but his art was harder to make disappear. Assembled from the steel rebar which was all that remained of millions of edifices, “Straight” is both a homage to those who died and a mute accusation of corrupt officials who compromised building standards to line their pockets.



Image: Inhabitat.com

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Creative Review:

One of the most powerful pieces in the exhibition, Straight, is Ai’s response to the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 [...].

Arranged in the shape of a seismic wave, a carpet of steel rods almost fills the gallery floor. Each piece of metal was taken from the site of the quake, which saw hundreds of poorly-constructed schools collapse and over 5,000 students killed.

At Ai’s direction, each rod his studio collected was hand-straightened, reverting its bent and buckled shape back to something like its original state. The names of the students who died – who the steel structures did not adequately protect – are rendered along the walls in the giant space.



Image: Creative Review


Image: Designboom - Video still of Ai walking among salvaged steel rebar

great videos

Smashing post met. Thank you.

Indeed. Hanging Man is a homage to Duchamp — as well as being both a nod to readymades and a fine example of one.

Spoon-feeding makes me a little uncomfortable because it discourages independent research and discovery. However, it would also be a shame if some viewers looked at the work and simply thought, "Big deal, it's a coat hanger bent into the shape of a face."

This Sotheby's article on the influence of Duchamp on Chinese contemporary art is an interesting read. Brief excerpt:

Ai Weiwei, who discovered Duchamp in-depth during his sojourn in New York in the 1980s and early 1990s, and who has paid an ongoing homage to the French master through his dynamic works, once declared that “After Duchamp, the existence of any art, its value, is entirely conceptual. Duchamp brought a new concept to modern art.”

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While we're at it, I'll throw in a favourite image of mine (among many) by Irving Penn, one of his brilliant corner portraits: 

Regrettably, I didn't have a camera with me when attending the exhibition.

Did anyone manage to get a snapshot of The Art Book in one of the vitrines along a wall in Room 9?

It was easily overlooked — but also one of the simplest and most effective works. No artistic intervention, transformation or alteration was even required by Ai Weiwei.

If trying to imagine what it's like living in a politically totalitarian single-party State, that piece described it well / Orwell.

If anyone has a spare exhibition book to sell please pm me