Ai Weiwei
Study of Perspective in Glass (Cobalt Blue)
Ai Weiwei’s middle finger has been a recurrent theme in the artist production. His photographic series, Study of Perspective (from 1995 onwards), encourages questioning towards governments, institutions and establishments. Ai’s middle finger in flipping of the bird gesture in front of symbols of power across the globe, from the Tiananmen Square to the White House, makes explicit the artist’s rejection of any form of oppression against human freedom. With a raise of his middle finger, Weiwei champions the social responsibility and the importance of standing for our own values and not those created by others.
“Just be aware that life is special. If we’re conscious about it, then things will change.”
Ai Weiwei
This precious edition of 100 Study of Perspective in Glass (2019) in six different colours nods to the series Study of Perspective, pointing out to the artist’s deepest beliefs regarding freedom of speech and democratic values. The translation in Murano glass of the iconic Ai Weiwei’s middle finger in six different colours, is powerful and yet elegant. The sculptures, made out from the artist´s own hand cast, embody the deep and engaged message of Study of Perspective series in an edition of precious material and superlative craftsmanship: the innate light and airy qualities of the glass melt with the sturdiness of the design producing a rare effect of beauty and mystic power.
Ai Weiwei (28 August 1957, Beijing) is a Chinese contemporary art representative, painter, sculptor, photographer and social activist. He is known, in particular, for his open criticism of the Chinese government’s human rights record, for which he was persecuted.
Ai Weiwei was born in Beijing. He is the son of the Chinese opposition poet Ai Qing (originally Jiang (蔣)). In 1958, his family, with the then one-year-old Ai, was exiled to a labour camp in a province in South China (Beidahuang, Heilongjiang) for criticising the communist regime. Later, in 1961, they were exiled to Shihezi in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Manchuria, where they lived for 16 years.
Education.
Since 1978, he studied at the Beijing Film Academy with directors Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. In the same year, 1978, he was one of the founders of the Stars art group. The group disbanded in 1983, but Ai Weiwei continued to participate in regular shows of the Stars group, as well as in the 2007 retrospective exhibition in Beijing, The Origin of Vision.
Between 1981 and 1993, he lived in the United States, for the first few years in Philadelphia and San Francisco. He studied English at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley. Then he moved to New York, where he briefly studied at the Parsons School of Design. Ai took courses at the Art Students League in New York in 1993-1996, where he studied with Bruce Dofman, Knox Martin and Richard Pouset-Dart. Later, the artist dropped out of school and lived by painting portraits on the street and for odd jobs. During this period, Ai Weiwei, influenced by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, began to create conceptual art by modifying “ready-made objects”.
Creative path
Formally, Ai Weiwei’s art is often based on the utopian ambitions of the “new world” of constructivism. At the same time, the artist creates subtle political works that take a critical stance towards the radical changes taking place in China.
Ai Weiwei’s eclectic and energetic work covers a wide range of art and culture, from curating and directing the China Art Archive & Warehouse to working as an architectural consultant for the Bird’s Nest (Beijing Olympic Stadium), and he has exhibited extensively around the world.
After returning to China in 1993, Ai Weiwei turned to elements of traditional Chinese culture in his work, using national symbolism in a provocative manner. The artist began to make a name for himself by defacing priceless Chinese artefacts. He dismantled antique furniture and assembled strange non-functional objects from it. For one of his works, he let a Han Dynasty urn fall to the ground and break (Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995-2004. Another object of national pride was also defaced – he painted the Coca Cola logo on an ancient vase (Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo, 1994).
Ai Weiwei often uses ceramics in his work. Ceramic art is strongly linked to Chinese cultural identity. One of his works, Pillars (2006-2007), is a forest of large vases that visitors can walk among.