Tag: Ai Weiwei

Conceptual wood imagined by Ai Weiwei

Artworks and play with beautiful wood by Chinese artist, architect and activist Ai Weiwei exhibited in Helsinki at the renovated HAM Museum

Ai Weiwei’s freedom to travel was reinstated in the autumn and he was able to attend openings of his big European shows, first in London at the Royal Academy and then in Helsinki at the renovated HAM Museum. Two spaces with very different cultural connotations, something that Ai’s work also plays with. At the moment Ai is travelling around Italy and Greece, helping refugees as well as researching for a forthcoming exhibition in Florence on the meaning of Renaissance architecture.

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Ai weiwei, Caochangdi, Royal Academy

Poetic materiality – Ai Weiwei and intuition

Artist and activist – Ai Weiwei’s collaborations on global architecture projects

 

At a recent Royal Academy event architect Daniel Rosbottom compared Ai Weiwei’s use of brick in his buildings with the sunflower seeds in the famous Tate Modern installation: “each brick is different, but also part of a multitude”. Ai’s poetic sensibility in the way he uses materials can be evidenced at RA’s retrospective, on until December 13, where a small separate exhibition tells the story of the studio and home he designed in the Beijing suburb of Caochangdi for himself and the series of brick houses around it.

With Swiss architect Simon Hartmann and expert on Chinese art Philip Tinari, Rosbottom spoke about architecture as part of Ai’s art and activism, drawing parallels with minimalism in the way the buildings make you think about spatial volumes. As Rosbottom points out the debt to artists like Donald Judd might be unconscious, but the play with proportion and spatial tension is similar.

Ai Weiwei, HHF Architects, Tsai Residence, Iwan Baan
Tsai Residence, Ai Weiwei and HHF Architects, American Architecture Award 2009, photo ©Iwan Baan

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