Ai Weiwei’s collection features in exhibition

CHINESE dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s new exhibition at the Design Museum in London features hundreds of thousands of objects which he has collected as part of his fascination with artefacts and traditional craftsmanship.

At the heart of the Ai Weiwei: Making Sense exhibition, which opens on April 7 and runs until July 30, a series of five expansive “fields” put the objects in the context of demolition and urban development in China.

The exhibition includes thousands of fragments from Weiwei’s porcelain sculptures which were destroyed when his studio was demolished by the Chinese state in 2018.

Weiwei, inset, an outspoken critic of China’s human rights record, said: “It still doesn’t make any sense why they had to do it besides they just wanted to do something to punish me, but punish me for what as an artist?

“They’re punishing individualism, they’re punishing freedom of speech, they’re punishing anybody trying to make a question or argument about their legitimacy.” The artist, best known for working on the design of Beijing’s Olympic stadium and filling the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with handcrafted porcelain sunflower seeds in 2010, said: “Collecting certainly played a big role in my practice… what has been left in the past is an important measure or factor – normally I call it evidence – to support my new identity.

“By doing that it takes a long time, and it takes a long time to be conscious how that would benefit my understanding of contemporary life. “Collecting is a process of learning. I think that time and accumulation is (a) very important act of the way I collect because it’s persistent.

"(It has) taken me about 30 years. (It’s) only when you collect so much that you start to imagine humans and society and the behaving of society because it tells much more unthinkable stories than just one single antique.”