STEVE LINN

In the Air (Ai Weiwei), 2015

WALL SCULPTURE mixed media  
47 x 118 x 7 in
119 x 300 x 18 cm

Sandblasted carved glass, cast glass, litho on aluminum, and holograms.

The dissident Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei has become in the past 20 years the most widely seen and exhibited artist on the planet. One of the very interesting things about this remarkable person is that the work appears to have no overall particular point of view. He has allowed himself to explore all areas of the arts with amazing success. There are works based on ancient ideas, as well as very contemporary conceptual pieces. There are works based on both Asian and occidental traditions. There is flat art and sculpture. There is video and photography. The sculpture touches virtually every material. The work is extremely hard to pin down, yet each piece stands on its own as a formidable work. At this point in his life, Weiwei has the resources to go wherever his mind chooses and that is a wonderful thing. I am enamored of his ability to think outside the box and continually come up with something new and important to say.

For this brief documentary excursion into Ai Weiwei and the subject matter of his works, it was necessary to narrow the vision a bit and focus on certain important aspects that I felt would make a crisp statement to best define this visionary artist. One of his better known conceptual pieces is the triptych photo that documents him dropping a 6th century Han Dynasty vase. For a period of several years, he was under house arrest, unable to leave his country, yet he was able to accomplish with the aid of others a remarkable number of exhibitions and the installation of numerous complex pieces internationally. He has also taken to making modern work by transforming old found objects such as clay pots into reassembled new works. They are repainted and used to create environments: the pots no longer stand on their own, but work together to form a larger sculptural statement. Ai Weiwei is a brand and for this reason I have chosen to put his face on everything in the piece. I have used holograms to indicate his presence/absence on the world stage: he is there without ever being there. The falling vase can be seen by moving from the cast glass version in the upper left tumbling through the air-like holograms to the broken shards in bronze at the bottom right, which can be seen in the museum installation photo. The two profile photos of my drawings symbolize his facing toward his Chinese culture and toward the culture of the rest of the world for his inspiration. In the middle is the man behind the work looking out to see what’s next.

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