‘This is a monumental type of exhibition, because it's an intimidating subject matter, and there is the heaviness of the history and the memory – Manchester deserves a show like this,’ says Ai Weiwei, on the opening of ‘Ai Weiwei: Button Up!’ at Manchester’s vast Aviva Studios. Weiwei is presenting his largest site-specific work to date in the hanger-like space – a big space for the big issues addressed, from industrialisation to globalisation and the consequences of British imperialism.

It is a natural move for Beijing-born Ai, who has dedicated his life’s work to human rights and censorship, through large-scale work that encourages a public response. This exhibition unites two new commissions with work shown in the UK for the first time. It is named in reference to Eight – Nation Alliance Flags, a work comprising eight large-scale flags carefully sewn with four million buttons that the artist bought from A Brown & Co Buttons factory in Croydon, when it closed down in 2019. The work is epic in size, and viewers should get close to appreciate the hand-crafted artistry.

Manchester is a natural home for this tribute to craftsmanship on a vast scale. Ai’s delve into historical Chinese and British relations plays out in this northern birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, a springboard for the artist from which to reflect on the consequences of British territorial expansion.

And the results really are big, from the 49m-long inflatable migrant boat, Law of the Journey (2017) to History of Bombs (2019), a 25m-wide installation depicting different varieties of bombs in 3.5 million toy bricks.

It is all set to the sounds of the work Nian Nian, recorded by 300 volunteers. It is the artist's tribute to the 69,000 people who were killed on 12 May 2008, in an earthquake in Sichuan. Parents demanded a full enquiry but were ignored. Meanwhile, local corruption that had led to poor construction was soon exposed. Ai was prevented from testifying in the trial of human rights activist Tan Zuoren, who had exposed the corruption; the artist received a blow that led to him being hospitalised for a brain haemorrhage.

Nian Nian, which names 5,197 schoolchildren who died in the earthquake, runs for 39 full days without stopping. It is one of Ai’s most moving works.

As part of the exhibition, Ai will present a 24-hour performance piece, Sewing a Button, which recreates the 81 days the artist was detained by public security in China in 2011. To mark the 15th anniversary, audiences will watch the artist eat, sleep and be interrogated by actors on screens around Aviva Studios.

Ai Weiwei on ‘Sewing a button’

Wallpaper*: Sewing a Button restages your 2011 detention in real time. What motivated you to embody that experience again physically, and how has your understanding of that period changed over the past 15 years?

Ai Weiwei: Fifteen years is not a short time for a person, yet I think neither my own circumstances nor the changes in the world have improved the reality of that detention. For someone who experienced it, re-enacting that reality carries two layered meanings. One is to help myself rethink what happened at that time. The other is to remind the audience that, through power or even violence, harm can be inflicted on individuals and even entire countries – a phenomenon that can be seen everywhere today. In other words, true power is the kind that is entirely unrestrained, and the truly weak are those whom no one defends or remembers. This is why I believe the re-enactment of this memory is necessary. At the same time, I feel that today’s situation is no better than it was then.

W*: What responsibility do you think the audience carries in witnessing this work?

AW: Everyone should observe what happened, how it happened, and the details of how power was exercised over people with differing opinions and viewpoints. Audiences should consider the effects of these measures and reflect on them, putting themselves in the place of those affected.

W*: In today’s hyper-connected world, how do you see the relationship between surveillance, power, and self-expression evolving?

AW: Today’s internet has already completely transformed previous dynamics. Regardless of the appearance of AI or other forms of surveillance, developments across politics, economics, and even the military have reduced personal privacy and rights. In this context, individual characteristics risk disappearing, while power grows stronger than ever. This is a new challenge: when individuality and personality vanish, what will human society become?

W*: How do you approach connecting these vast historical forces with personal, human experiences, both your own and those represented in your work?

AW: No matter the scale of historical power, it cannot be separated from individual experience. There is no grand historical phenomenon that exists independently of the people living through it. Therefore, grounding art in one’s own experiences is not merely a matter of creative choice – it is a fundamental responsibility as a human being.

‘Ai Weiwei: Button Up!’ from 2 July – 6 September 2026 at Aviva Studios, Water Street, Manchester, M3 4JQ

In contrast to the excessive noise that so often defines Milan Design Week, silence shapes Rubelli’s project, which presents an immersive installation in its showroom of the Venetian family-run company of luxury fabrics in Via Fatebenefratelli, created in collaboration with artist and activist Ai Weiwei.

‘Our first encounter dates back to an edition of the Venice Biennale,’ says Rubelli CEO Nicolò Favaretto Rubelli. ‘But it was only last October, when we began thinking about this year’s Design Week, that we reconnected. It was no random choice: he is a figure who has endured immense hardship – I have his most recent autobiography, published not long ago. Exile, humiliation, activism, imprisonment: above all, his mission is to communicate his message.’ Art and design have always been part of Rubelli’s DNA, the CEO adds, citing past collaborations with Paola Navone, Luke Edward Hall and Peter Marino, among others.

The title of Ai Weiwei and Rubelli’s exhibition, ‘About Silk’, is no coincidence: it marks the first time the artist has worked with this material. ‘Silk, one of humanity’s oldest materials, transcends the realm of imagination and lies beyond the scope of ordinary craftsmanship,’ says Ai Weiwei.

‘It is fascinating to me. I am a collector of ancient silks, some of which are over 3,000 years old. Each dynasty’s silk reflects different styles, but they all come from the delicate work of silkworms, making silk as a material both delicate and precious. When creating this artwork, my primary challenge was using silk as a medium to express long-standing themes such as human rights, freedom of speech, and the censorship system. Throughout this process, there were many discussions with Rubelli’.

The first room of the exhibit resembles a fully enclosed box, shielded from street light, where visitors are immersed in an intricate silk lampas. The composition radiates outwards from a central point like a burst of fireworks, with the regularity of a classical, almost Baroque drawing. On closer inspection, a dense weave of symbols emerges, tracing the artist’s history and struggles: surveillance cameras, handcuffs and chains, llamas (for Weiwei, a symbol of freedom and resistance to internet censorship in China), and the Twitter bird – from a time when it still represented digital freedom of expression. The reference is clearly Ai Weiwei’s original design, ‘The Animal that Looks like a Llama but is Actually an Alpaca’.

The warp of the fabric consists of 9,600 silk threads, equally divided between deep red and golden yellow. ‘The inspiration comes from a vase I bought 15-20 years ago in Beijing,’ Rubelli explains, describing a surface created through the interplay of intertwined threads, producing an iridescent effect reminiscent of Chinese ceramics, where colour is never uniform but vibrates with tonal variation. Metallic wefts enhance brilliance and shading, while the combination of five wefts and three shades of gold creates unexpected depth.

At the centre of the room stands a sculptural sofa upholstered in the same elaborate silk lampas. Its geometric backrest reveals subtle variations in depth, creating converging lines that distort perception. ‘Ai Weiwei had dreamed of making a sofa,’ says Rubelli. ‘When we met, he took a block and sketched it out. At first, I did not understand his idea of one part narrowing while another widens. The result is intriguing – more an art object than a sofa.’

The installation continues in a second room dedicated to ‘Finger’, one of the artist’s most recognisable motifs, inviting viewers to ‘raise our middle finger’ against sites of power and censorship. It also serves as a backdrop for two display cases designed by Formafantasma, containing textile documents from the Rubelli Historical Archive and the Rubelli Foundation, highlighting the millenary textile dialogue between Weiwei’s China and Rubelli’s Venice.

On the lower floor, the artist speaks through a black-and-white visual narrative, his voice calm and reflective. The documentary film, created for the occasion by Argentine director Felipe Sanguinetti and filmed between Downing College, Cambridge, and the Rubelli weaving mill in Como, captures the exchanges, sketches and experiments behind the project.

‘In the course of so-called social progress, we have increasingly lost our connection to nature and the inspiration it provides, much of which has been supplanted by new technologies,’ Ai Weiwei explains. ‘Similarly, a lot of modern technology has distanced itself from political, social, and historical discourse. In an era dominated by AI and algorithms, we see a growing narrative of technological control that continuously erases or obscures human nature and craftsmanship. This shift diminishes tactile experiences and emotions on a large scale, which I believe poses a threat to human nature and to historical memory. That is why, in my collaboration with Rubelli, I sought to develop a new approach using silk, a medium that could embody both functionality and complexity.’

Rubelli agrees: ‘We are a Venetian family company working with silk and precious textiles. I’m very glad that, through our work, we can help spread Ai Weiwei’s reflections and message.’

Follow all the latest news from Milan Design Week 2026 with our editors’ live blog.

Artist and activist Ai Weiwei – known for his provocative exploration of human rights, as seen in an ongoing retrospective in Seattle, as well as his ability to capture the imagination with large-scale works, such as a Lego take on Claude Monet’s Water Lilies – is set to unveil a new public outdoor installation in New York this September, at Franklin D Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park.

The installation is part of a new project by Four Freedoms Park Conservancy, titled Art X Freedom, which sees artists commissioned to create site-specific works that investigate issues around social justice and freedom.

Ai Weiwei’s new public installation coming to Four Freedoms State Park

Ai’s installation, titled Camouflage, will launch the project on 10 September 2025, aligned with the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and the 80th Session of the UN General Assembly.

The artist looked to the park’s location and history for inspiration. It was designed by American modernist Louis Kahn, and is located on Roosevelt Island, a stone’s throw from the UN heaquarters, just across the river. The park was built to commemorate the legacy of president Roosevelt through a lens of contemporary art and culture.

Ai’s installation is intended to provoke thoughts around vulnerability and protection, while questioning the relationship between truth and concealment. It will take the form of a large structure draped in camouflage netting in an open sanctuary. Howard Axel, CEO of Four Freedoms Park Conservancy, said, ‘Artists have paved the way in activism and advocacy throughout history. Art X Freedom amplifies this work by inviting contemporary artists to re-envision FDR’s freedoms for future generations by realising major new public artworks.’

Camouflage by Ai Weiwei will remain on view at the park through 1 December 2025, fdrfourfreedomspark.org

This spring, the Seattle Art Museum hosts a moveable feast of Ai Weiwei, presenting for the first time the work of one artist across all three locations.

Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei is at the Seattle Art Museum until September 7th. The artist’s first US retrospective in over a decade, it is his largest-ever exhibition in the US features over 130 works created over four decades, from the 1980s to the 2020s.

The Chinese dissident artist and activist’s largest and most ambitious LEGO work to date, Water Lilies (2022), will be on view at the Seattle Asian Art Museum for one year beginning March 19^th while a collection of twelve monumental animal heads representing the Chinese zodiac, Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (Bronze) (2010), will be installed at Olympic Sculpture Park for a two-year period beginning May 17^th.

FOONG Ping, exhibition curator and SAM’s Foster Foundation Curator of Chinese Art notes, 'Presenting Ai Weiwei’s work at all three SAM locations is incredibly ambitious, and we are thrilled and inspired by the challenge.'

She adds, 'Each of SAM’s locations is uniquely suited to showcase his diverse body of work, which ranges from the intimate to the monumental. Few artists could integrate into our spaces so effortlessly. It’s been a delight and honour to collaborate with Ai in developing this fresh look at his life’s work.'

One journalist asked at a press conference/preview event last week, 'Why the Seattle Art Museum?' to which the artist replied, 'Why not?'

But upon reflection, Seattle with its mix of activism and capitalism (entering the city from the airport road visitors are greeted by a glowing Starbucks logo atop its HQ) and a well-funded cultural scene may be the perfect venue for Ai Weiwei. The city also has a long history of and a growing importance as a centre for Asian art. In fact, its first incarnation in the lovely 1933 Art Deco building that is currently home to the Seattle Asian Art Museum (which opened as such in 1994), was established by founding patrons Richard E. Fuller, and his mother, Mrs. Margaret E. MacTavish Fuller, whose significant collection of Asian Art was part of the permanent collection.

The main collection moved downtown in 1991 to a purposed built building designed by Robert Venturi. The Olympic Sculpture Park, designed by Weiss/Manfredi Architects opened in 2007 in a repurposed industrial waterfront site near Belltown that became one of the only downtown greenspaces. Here Wei Wei’s Zodiac series will become an interesting juxtaposition between Richard Serra’s 2004 weathering steel work Wake and Alexander Calder’s iconic 1971 The Eagle in red painted sheet steel that dialogues with freighters in the harbour.

The Ai/Rebel retrospective documents Weiwei’s transformation from a young artist hanging out in New York’s lower eastside to his detention by Chinese authorities to his status as an international art world star. Featuring some of the artist’s best known works, including Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), Study of Perspective (1995-2011), Sunflower Seeds (2010), Neolithic Vase with Coca Cola Logo (gold) (2015), and Illumination (2019, 2024 exhibition copy), it also boasts the debut of new works never shown in the US. These include Marble Sofa (2011), a carving of an ordinary leather sofa, part of a series that transforms everyday objects by monumentalizing them.

Meanwhile new Trumpian realities lend a timeliness to Weiwei’s provocative exploration of issues around human rights, freedom of expression and authoritarianism encompassing performance, photography, sculpture, video, and immersive installation.

Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei is at the Seattle Art Museum until September 7th

seattleartmuseum

Love or hate, which lasts longer? Is Edward Snowden guilty? Will capitalism have an end? For Ai Weiwei, it’s not the answer to these questions that is interesting, but rather the way we search for it. 

In a new exhibition at Piccadilly Circus, London, Ai explores this drive for information. Over the course of 81 days – the length of time he spent in a Chinese prison – the artist asks questions, a new one each day, to both artificial intelligence (AI) and to the general public. 

For Ai, it marks his first experimentation with artificial intelligence as an art form. ‘In our current epoch, characterised by its complexity and multifaceted nature, the confluence of our knowns and unknowns presents the need for us to reframe our inquiries in a rejuvenated manner,’ he says. ‘This is a period abundant with questions; never before has humanity grappled with a state of tumult and bewilderment to this extent.’

Ai vs AI, an 81-day quest for enlightenment

Ai draws inspiration from the Tiānwèn (天問) – 172 questions to the gods, written by poet Qu Yuan 2,300 years ago on the walls of a temple – for the Circa 20:24 project. His chosen questions, ranging from the humorous to the philosophical, are all set to appear at 20:24 local time on the Piccadilly Lights, questioning our incessant need for information in a celebration of sensory overload. While some questions can be painful – Why am I here? Why did this happen to me? – they are, essentially, human, a clear distinction between humans and the machine that seeks to answer them.

‘In the present era, if art exists, its essence lies in endeavouring to forge the potential liberation of individuals from the shackles of knowledge or the bondage of information,’ Ai adds. ‘This is not about freedom of speech. This is about freedom of questions. Everybody has the right to ask questions. Questions are important because they relate to our personal stories. If humans will ever be liberated, it will be because we ask the right questions, not provide the right answers.’

Circa presents Ai vs AI, the first of four major new commissions, beginning with an 81-day quest for enlightenment (11 January – 31 March 2024) in Piccadilly Circus, London

circa.art

Frieze London 2023 – bigger, better, longer than any Frieze before – sees the world’s cultural magpies descend on the city. As Frieze marks its 20th anniversary, it’s a big moment for the world’s most famous art fair, and one it is celebrating with a packed programme of events, spanning the established – El Anatsui, Frans Hals and Ai Weiwei lead the heavyweights at Frieze Masters – to the eclectic, such as Sprüth Magers’ presentation of a Hyun-Sook Song retrospective and White Cube’s Mona Hatoum exhibition. More than 160 galleries from 46 countries will come together from 11 – 15 October. 

The action extends far beyond the perimeters of the fair’s epicentre in Regent’s Park. Saatchi Yates art cabaret with Will St John at The Box; Berlin-based and Jamaican-born multimedia artist MJ Harper’s one-off performance at London’s Koko; and Avery Singer’s show at Hauser & Wirth coinciding with Frieze’s opening are just some of our Frieze Week highlights.

Frieze London 2023: what to see in the fair

Frieze Masters presents works from the last few centuries in a generous curation. Galleria Continua will focus on the years 1983 to 1999 in a presentation of Ai Weiwei’s works including his famous Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn and June, 1994. El Anatsui, whose 2023 Hyundai commission is concurrently opening at the Tate Turbine Hall, will showcase a 30-year career with a solo booth at Jack Shainman, while D’Lan Contemporary’s showing of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s paintings marks the first appearance of an Australian First Nations artist at Frieze Masters. Also not to be missed is Nigeria’s most important modernist, Ben Enwonwu, at Kó Gallery from Lagos.

Leading galleries are presenting a selection of group, solo and thematic shows. Look out for Sadie Coles HQ, which nods to the fair’s first edition in 2003 with works by artists who took part, including  John Currin and Sarah Lucas. Also feeling nostalgic is Pilar Corrias, whose solo exhibition by Margate-based artist Sophie Von Hellerman is inspired by Margate’s Dreamland. Immersive works, such as Julianknxx’s video presented by Edel Assanti, which coincides with his Barbican Curve commission, join bronze sculptures by Barbara Chase-Riboud at Hauser & Wirth. 

For Lisson Gallery, US-born artist Van Hanos is the focus, with paintings that draw from time spent in Vienna, while Pace Gallery is giving us a taster of 2024, with works by Paulina Olowska, Mao Yan, Yto Barrada, Kiki Kogelnik, and Robert Longo. At Nicola Vassell, a presentation of new paintings by Deborah Anzinger will examine the ways the artist works with ground cookshop charcoal, a fuel indigenous to her native Jamaica. In the Breguet booth, ‘Resisting Time’, curated by independent curator Somi Sim, will look at the concept of time through artists including Hanne Darboven and Julien Coignet. Marianne Boesky Gallery will showcase Danielle Mckinney’s first U.K. solo presentation, shining a light on her paintings of female figures, caught in moments of leisure.

To celebrate Frieze London’s 20 years, eight established artists have been invited to propose a solo exhibition from an emerging artist. For Tracey Emin, Margate-based Vanessa Raw’s paintings are a natural choice; for Olafur Eliasson, it is Fabian Knecht and his installation of pieces of clothing used as camouflage to protect Russian targets in Ukraine. Anthea Hamilton champions Carlos Villa’s 1980s body-print series, Wolfgang Tillmans’ new sculptures and silver gelatin prints by Mark Barker. Meanwhile, the Modern Institute is showcasing the work of artists Rachel Eulena Williams, Jim Lambie and Andrew Sim and more

Elsewhere, talks not to miss include Thomas J Price in conversation with Gus Casely-Hayford (director, V&A East), Arlene Shechet in conversation with Sheena Wagstaff, and Rachel Whiteread with art historian Briony Fer. Towards the end of the week, catch Maggi Hambling, Sarah Lucas and Louisa Buck and Mandy El Sayegh, Flavia Frigeri and Valerie Cassel Olive.

Frieze London 2023: what to see outside the fair

There’s a packed programme of shows, performances and talks taking place around London during Frieze. 

Listen: Art for Thought Coffee Cocktail evening 

Illycaffè’s collaboration with arts club The Cultivist is a fruitful one. A series of evening talks at the Michelin-starred Apricity will see experts lead the way on arts-based topics. Joey Lico, executive director of The Cultivist (and former director at the New York Foundation for the Arts and art advisor to the White House under the Obama administration) will advise ‘How to Build an Art House’ on 9 October, while curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum East, Dr Madeline Haddon, will discuss ‘Art Through the Ages’ on 23 October. Guests can relax, learn and sip on their coffee cocktails. 

Tickets available @ £40 per person from Eventbrite.co.uk

Listen: Ruinart x Talkart podcast at Serpentine Pavilion

Maison Ruinart and Serpentine have teamed up to explore the possibilities in contemporary art. This live TalkArt podcast recording, the first in a series, will see contemporary artist Eva Jospin and Talk Art Podcast hosts Russell Tovey and Robert Diament discuss Jospin’s inspirations behind Ruinart Carte Blanche Commission, Promenade(s).

Tickets available from Eventbrite.co.uk

See: Saatchi Yates

Catch Brooklyn-based artist Will St John chatting to journalist and photographer Marc C O’Flaherty on 9 October. See St John’s work while you are there, on show until 22 October.

saatchiyates.com/

Do: Minor Attractions

Don’t miss this ‘non-fair’ of performance, music and nightlife, held across two weeks at two different London sites. 

minorattractions.com/Minor-Attractions

154 Contemporary African Art Fair

Held for the 11th year at Somerset House, this year’s exhibition will host over 60 international exhibitors, making it the largest show to date. 

1-54.com/london

See Saatchi Yates and Will St. John kick off Frieze Week with an exhibition and cabaret

Saatchi Yates is marking the beginning of Frieze London 2023 with a celebration of its three year anniversary. To commemorate the the occasion, the space will host an exhibition with artist Will St. John, who created classically influenced portraits of New York’s drag queens and trans community through painting and sculpture. The gallery will be hosting a talk at 6:30 on Monday 9 th October which is open to the public and his eponymous exhibition itself will be running until 22nd October.

wallpaper.com

Don't miss: Nanomuseum, a limited-edition collaboration between French jewelry house Dauphin and Serpentine Galleries, at Dover Street Market

Charlotte Dauphin and Hans Ulrich Obrist have worked together to create a series of pieces inspired by works of art.  

london.doverstreetmarket.com

Visit: Kaws' takeover of London’s Shreeji News

Gabriel Chipperfield, who transformed the newsagent’s in 2020, creating a salon and reading room and space for events and exhibitions, as well as a wide selection of magazines, let Kaws lead the way when it came to his residency

wallpaper.com

Visit: Avant Arte at Matches

Avant Arte is taking over Matches townhouse at 5 Carlos Place, London, during Frieze, with the installation on display until 4 November. 

avantarte.com

Fall down the rabbit hole into Charlotte Colbert’s Frieze Week dreamland

‘Dreamland Sirens’, a London exhibition from Charlotte Colbert, is curated by Simon de Pury and LA-based gallery UTA Artist Space

wallpaper.com

Don't miss: MJ Harper’s performance piece at London’s Koko 

Artist MJ Harper will premiere ‘Arias for a New World’ at Koko in London this Sunday, 15 October 2023

wallpaper.com

See: Bronx-Based Artist Kenny Rivero's UK debut

The artist's first exhibition outside of the US and Mexico unites his paintings and drawings at Charles Moffett, No. 9 Cork Street, from 5 - 21 October.

https://charlesmoffett.com/artists/13-kenny-rivero/

See:  Yinka Ilori's piece created for member's club George for Frieze London

Yinka Ilori draws on his Nigerian heritage for the piece on show at George Club throughout Frieze. 

georgeclub.com

Ahead of his major show at London’s Design Museum, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has unveiled a homage to Impressionist painter, Claude Monet, constructed entirely of Lego. 

The piece, titled Water Lilies #1, is Ai’s largest Lego artwork to date, spanning 15m in length and comprising 650,000 studs of Lego bricks in 22 colours.

The new work will be on view as part of the Design Museum’s much-anticipated exhibition ‘Ai Weiwei: Making Sense’, which opens on Friday 7 April, and will be the artist’s first exhibition to focus on design and architecture, as well as his largest solo show in eight years. 

In Water Lilies #1, Ai probes notions of reality and artifice. Although Monet’s word-famous painting represents the epitome of natural beauty, the pond and gardens he depicts were in fact a man-made construct, designed and created by Monet himself at the turn of the 20th century. In Ai’s work, the Lego bricks eliminate the humanistic gesture of Monet’s brushstrokes in favour of a simplified, depersonalised language of pixel-like parts and colours. Through this, Ai comments on contemporary modes of digital image consumption, and all that might be lost in the process. 

As Ai Weiwei commented, ‘Our world is complex and collapsing towards an unpredictable future. It's crucial for individuals to find a personalised language to express their experience of these challenging conditions. Personalised expression arises from identifying with history and memories while creating a new language and narrative. Without a personal narrative, artistic narration loses its quality. In Water Lilies #1 I integrate Monet's Impressionist painting, reminiscent of Zenism in the East, and concrete experiences of my father and me into a digitised and pixelated language. Toy bricks as the material, with their qualities of solidity and potential for deconstruction, reflect the attributes of language in our rapidly developing era where human consciousness is constantly dividing.’ 

Ai Weiwei first deployed Lego bricks as an art medium in 2014 when he used them to create portraits of political prisoners. Now a key element of his practice, Lego will also feature heavily in the Design Museum show, most notably in Untitled (Lego Incident) which will see thousands of Lego blocks fill the gallery floor. Ai sourced the materials for the work (seen fully assembled for the first time at the Design Museum) via public donations from around the world, in response to Lego briefly refusing to sell their products to him in 2014. 

Justin McGuirk, Chief Curator at the Design Museum and curator of ‘Ai Weiwei: Making Sense’ said: ‘Several of the works in this exhibition capture the destruction of urban development in China over the last two decades. With Water Lilies #1, Ai Weiwei presents us with an alternate vision – a garden paradise.’ McGuirk also describes how Ai has embedded a more poignant narrative into the piece: a dark portal on the right-hand side, representing the door to the underground dugout in Xinjiang province where Ai and his father, the acclaimed poet Ai Qing, lived in forced exile in the 1960s. ‘On the one hand, he has personalised it by inserting the door of his desert childhood home, and on the other, he has depersonalised it by using an industrial language of modular Lego blocks. This is a monumental, complex and powerful work and we are proud to be the first museum to show it.’

‘Ai Weiwei: Making Sense’ runs at the Design Museum from 7 April-30 July 2023. designmuseum.org

There is a hint of William Morris to the limited-edition cover of the Wallpaper* April 2023 issue. But the repeating pattern of intertwining colourful forms did not come from the hand of the 19th-century British designer and leader of the Arts & Crafts movement, but rather from pioneering 21st-century artist Ai Weiwei.

As explored in our exclusive profile on the artist, Ai’s cover takeover anticipates his first museum exhibition focusing on design, ‘Making Sense’, which opens at the Design Museum, London on 7 April 2023. The cover artwork is a preview of the wallpaper that will wrap around the museum’s soaring atrium, and bring a playful jolt of colour to a space characterised by neutral tones.

The motifs relate to surveillance and free speech, which are Ai’s longstanding pre-occupations. Long before he went into exile in Europe in 2015, his outspoken criticism of corruption and defence of human rights had incurred the wrath of the Chinese government. In 2018, when a magnitude 7.9 earthquake in Sichuan province killed at least 69,000 people, he launched a citizens’ investigation to expose the corrupt officials responsible for the shoddy construction of school buildings that collapsed. In retaliation, the government put him under close watch.

‘Surveillance cameras sprouted up everywhere around the perimeter of my studio. During the day, plainclothes officers would take turns standing watch outside, and at night they would huddle up inside an unmarked white sedan,’ the artist wrote in his 2021 memoir, 1,000 Years of Joys and Sorrows. ‘Having nothing to hide, I had nothing to fear [...] transparency would work in my favour.’

The surveillance cameras in the wallpaper pattern – an instrument of control neutralised into a decorative object – nod to this episode, as do the steel rebars. Distraught by the sight of twisted rebar at collapsed schools, Ai brought more than 200 tonnes of the material back to Beijing and employed a dozen workers to hammer every one of the pieces back into shape, as though they had just come off the manufacturing line. At his solo show at Washington DC’s Hirshhorn Museum in 2012, this rebar was laid on the ground in an undulating pattern to form the installation Straight, which used an act of repair to cast a bitter light on an irreversible loss.

Meanwhile, the handcuffs allude to the 81 days in 2011 that Ai spent in secret detention, purportedly for tax evasion (he soon realised the allegations were a pretext for political persecution – when police raided his studio, they left his accounting books intact), and the Twitter birds refer to the artist’s prolific use of social media, which gave him in independent voice in a cultural landscape saturated by propaganda. 

Then there’s the alpaca, which gave the wallpaper its title – The Animal That Looks Like a Llama But is Really an Alpaca 2023 (2023). This bit requires a bit of explanation for non-Chinese viewers. The alpaca looks ‘harmless, naive, innocent’, says the artist during our interview in February, at his home in Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal. But it’s in fact an allusion to an internet meme that first appeared in January 2009, about a type of alpaca called the ‘grass mud horse’. A viral video in the style of a children’s song described the grass mud horse from the Gobi Desert whose existence is threatened by an evil river crab. 

In fact, ‘grass mud horse’ in Mandarin Chinese sounds very much like a commonly deployed pejorative about another person’s mother. ‘Everyone in China who sees this would laugh,’ Ai says. The meme was coined to poke fun at China’s censorship regime, which has clamped down on humour as a form of protest (in recent years, it also removed images of Winnie the Pooh in response to comparisons that netizens have drawn between the cartoon character and the Chinese president). 

Pausing a YouTube video of the grass mud horse that he has gleefully played at full volume, the artist elaborates, ‘the authoritarian police [in China] has no sense of humour. But they can’t stop our use of humour as a means of confrontation. Humour makes them feel powerless, and so it’s an asset that can really melt down their foundation.’

In making the grass mud horse a protagonist of his wallpaper design, Ai not only brings a chuckle to those in the know, but also reminds us of the potency of humour as a political statement, as he does best.

‘Ai Weiwei: Making Sense’ runs from 7 April-30 July 2023 at Design Museum, London, designmuseum.org

Ai’s limited-edition cover is available exclusively to Wallpaper* subscribers and from the Design Museum Shop. aiweiwei.com

Ai Weiwei is not known to do things in half measures. For his installation at Documenta 12, in 2007, the artist famously brought 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel, Germany, for staggered week-long stays, using his blog to recruit volunteers between the ages of two and 70. Titled Fairytale, the ambitious artwork seemed to herald his homeland’s arrival on the world stage (‘To explore the world is a right that you acquire when you are born, and these travellers were exercising this right for the very first time,’ he wrote in his recent autobiography), while speaking to contemporary global issues, such as mass migration and dramatic population growth. Three years later, invited to take over the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern, Ai commissioned 1,600 ceramicists in the pottery town of Jingdezhen to handcraft 100 million sunflower seeds in porcelain, which he then poured into the cavernous exhibition space to create a seemingly infinite landscape – a simple motif elevated into a powerful statement on the rise of ‘made in China’. 

Ai Weiwei:  ‘Making Sense’ at the Design Museum

Though slightly more modest in scale, the centrepiece of Ai’s exhibition at London’s Design Museum (until 30 July 2023), similarly evokes the cumulative power of the humble object. Taking over the main gallery are five ‘fields’, each between 44 and 72 sq m and filled with readymades ranging from Neolithic stone tools to Lego bricks (see his Water Lilies #1, his largest ever work in Lego), which collectively offer a snapshot of design history across eight millennia.

Titled ‘Making Sense’, this is Ai’s first exhibition focusing on design, which seems surprising coming from a conceptual artist. But Ai has always been fascinated with material culture, an interest that he credits to his life story. The son of Ai Qing, one of modern China’s most famous poets, Weiwei was born in Beijing in 1957. He grew up in the northwest province of Xinjiang as a consequence of his father’s political exile. Denied proper accommodation, the family lived in a dugout – a picture of which remains the lock screen on the artist’s iPhone today – where they slept on a platform covered with wheat stalks, had no electricity, and constantly had to fend off rats and lice. Such squalid conditions necessitated improvisation: Ai remembers assembling a simple shelf from a board, four nails and a piece of string, and building a stove to offer some respite from the bitter winters. These experiences informed his early understanding of design, not as an aesthetic pursuit but as ‘people using rudimentary, found materials to try and better their lives’, he explains on a crisp February morning, as we speak on the back porch of his home in Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal. 

That notion of design as a survival tool was turned on its head when Ai moved to the US in 1981, becoming one of the first Chinese students to study in the West during an era of reform. He wound up in New York (where he briefly attended the Parsons School of Design), which gave him his first experience of ‘extreme capitalism’. But, in 1993, when Ai returned to Beijing to visit his ailing father, he found that China had become a capitalist state too, and was pursuing economic growth at all cost: ‘Even though I’d returned to my native land, I felt more foreign than ever.’

It was then that he began to frequent antique markets with his brother. ‘We spent at least four to six hours every day, going through thousands of pieces and trying to imagine the past. Because of the Cultural Revolution, we never had a history education,’ he explains. ‘And in the United States, everything was new. So these markets gave me the chance to really look into each object. I started to collect, and to understand the past through material culture. I developed an interest in human efforts [at shaping objects]: how they made sense, why they made sense, how they dealt with materials. And how styles completely changed from the Han dynasty to the Tang dynasty, or from the Tang dynasty to the Song dynasty. Then I understood that even a perfect language can completely disappear under different political circumstances. There’s nothing left. That gave me a lot of perspective on the human mind.’

As his stature and resources have grown, Ai’s collecting has become more prolific over the years. While he says that he only collects things that fascinate him, without regard to their potential usage in art installations, his collections now form the basis of the five fields at the Design Museum. Still Life comprises around 1,800 Neolithic stone tools, liberated from archaeological context. Adjacent, Spouts features over 240,000 spouts from the Song dynasty (960-1279), believed to have been cut off from teapots that didn’t meet quality standards. Nearby is Untitled (Porcelain Balls) (2022), featuring 100,000 porcelain projectiles from a similar period. ‘What fascinates me is that they’re not machine made, they’re handmade with such care, and none of them are exactly the same size, but they’re made to the greatest possible degree of perfection,’ enthuses Ai.

The final two fields are filled with contemporary materials. The blue porcelain fragments were salvaged from destroyed artworks in the artist’s Beijing studio, which was razed by Chinese authorities in 2018. (His Shanghai studio had likewise been torn down in 2011. In an act of reclamation, Ai is now rebuilding that studio on his Portuguese estate.) 

Meanwhile, Lego bricks have been a favoured material for Ai since 2014, when he created Lego portraits of activists, prisoners of conscience, and advocates of free speech from around the world for an installation at Alcatraz. For three months in the following year, the toymaker declined bulk orders from the artist, citing a policy that prevents its bricks from being used in ‘political works’. Ai responded with a crowdsourcing campaign: ‘People supported me by sending in their sons’ and daughters’ Lego bricks. It became a little social movement,’ he remembers. At the Design Museum, the bricks ‘show my understanding of how design not only comes out of our minds, but also exists as a product of human struggle’.

In his use of readymades, Ai pays homage to Marcel Duchamp, whom he calls ‘the engineer and designer of modern cultural activity’. He first encountered the French conceptualist’s work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art when he arrived in the States. Realising that ‘art is in our minds, rather than in our vision’, Ai created Hanging Man (1986), a wire hanger bent in Duchamp’s profile. This is part of the new exhibition, along with three more recent pieces that resemble hangers, alluding to the 81 days in 2011 that Ai spent in secret police detention, for alleged ‘economic crimes’. He petitioned for a month before the police would allow him six plastic hangers, so he could dry his T-shirts. ‘At one point, I thought I would be imprisoned for 13 years,’ says the artist, who has since remade his symbol of oppression in wood, stainless steel and Venetian glass. In a similar vein, the show includes handcuffs in hardwood and in jade, a material with great historical and spiritual significance in China.

Within the same display case, visitors will encounter other everyday motifs refashioned in noble materials. A Styrofoam takeout box, remade in white marble, calls our attention to the environmental impact of disposable objects and the dark side of China’s economic development, while a construction helmet cast in glass suggests the fragility of labour protections in an economy built on the backs of migrant workers. While the material shifts prompt us to look at the objects in a new light, the choice of mundane typologies nods to another of Ai’s artistic heroes, Andy Warhol, who taught him that ‘what we do every day has profound meaning’.

The plight of the dispossessed is a recurring theme for Ai, who bemoans that, in spite of economic and technological progress, humans ‘remain a species with no compassion, selfish and short-sighted’. In 2008, he was spurred to action by a magnitude 7.9 earthquake in Sichuan province. It killed at least 69,000 people, many of them schoolchildren, whose schools collapsed due to shoddy construction to which corrupt government officials had turned a blind eye. Ai channelled his despair into a citizens’ investigation published on his blog, and began to use backpacks and steel rebar as motifs for his artwork. On view at the Design Museum will be two calls for remembrance – Snake Ceiling (2008), a 16m-long serpentine installation made of backpacks, and Rebar and Case (2014), which sees three pieces of mangled rebar remade in marble and entombed in wood.

A wooden cabinet, also made in 2014, was inspired by a different tragedy. In 2012, five boys were found dead in a dumpster bin in Guizhou province. They are believed to have lit a charcoal fire in the bin to keep warm and been poisoned by carbon monoxide. The piece ‘is like a Ming-style classic cabinet, made with the finest materials by the best craftspeople. There are no nails, just hidden joints.’ But by modelling its form after the dumpster bin, Ai is also making a powerful political statement about the people who are left behind while China becomes more prosperous. ‘It comes from my understanding of “it could have been my life”,’ he explains. A similar logic has inspired the more recent installations in the show, comprising life vests collected from the Greek island of Lesbos, bringing to light the global refugee crisis.

Alongside Ai’s sculptural and design output, there’s documentation of Beijing’s rapidly evolving built environment in the early 2000s, when the government eagerly knocked down older buildings and replaced them with looming towers. Four films take the viewer on a journey across the city’s main streets, while a photo series, National Stadium (2005-7), shows the construction of the Bird’s Nest stadium ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Ai worked with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on its design, but later dissociated himself from the project and boycotted the opening ceremony. ‘I realised that architecture is political. It doesn’t matter how good the building is, still, after we’ve designed it, it becomes an element of state propaganda,’ he says. In the 15 years since, we’ve seen more flagrant instances of sportswashing – among them last year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing and World Cup in Qatar. With this in mind, does Ai still believe that his disavowal of the stadium was worth the personal cost he has endured?

‘Very often, speaking up is not going to work, because the powers you’re against are so massive. And whether the Olympics or the World Cup, it’s really about profit. You have to remember this one line in the movie All The President’s Men: “Just follow the money”. Then you can understand most political intentions,’ Ai replies. Even so, he insists on taking a stand against misinformation and the loss of human life: ‘You always have to be prepared to speak out, no matter how big the consequences, to protect the most profound meaning of being human.’

That belief in free speech, and in standing up for one’s convictions, informs Ai’s Study of Perspective series. The innocuous title belies the images’ defiant intent: it shows the artist pointing his middle finger at sites of political and cultural power, such as Tiananmen Square and the White House. A selection of these studies will be on view at the Design Museum. 

Free speech is likewise the theme of The Animal That Looks Like a Llama But is Really an Alpaca 2023 (2023). Previewed on the limited-edition cover of Wallpaper's April 2023 issue, the colourful pattern is being made into a wallpaper that will wrap around the museum’s atrium. Among its motifs are surveillance cameras, handcuffs, chains, steel rebars, alpacas and Twitter birds. The alpacas are a reference to a Chinese meme that pokes fun at internet censorship, and a testament to humour as a tool against authoritarianism. Meanwhile, the birds reflect Ai’s unwavering faith in the power of social media. He became a household name in China thanks to his blog, which started in 2005 and had 17 million readers in its four-year lifetime, and remains an avid user of Instagram and Twitter today. Though he acknowledges social media’s deleterious effects on individual attention spans and its potential as a vehicle of misinformation, Ai points out that ‘we don’t have another choice. This is the only time in human history which equips us to be individuals. The overflow of information means we can make our own judgments and express ourselves independently.’

While drawing on specific contemporary concerns, ‘Making Sense’ speaks to universal human themes, says Justin McGuirk, the museum’s chief curator. ‘It takes a step back from the detail of design, and really looks at design as a way of being that hasn’t changed. Weiwei shows us that design is a language that communicates to us across generations, through which we can understand something about our ancestors.’

Ai is measured in his assessment of his own impact. He points out, for instance, that he’s not hopeful he will see a democratic China in his lifetime. This being said, as a believer in cumulative power, he is ultimately optimistic that things can change for the better: ‘My work may just be one drop of water in the ocean, but the ocean is made of water. So I want to remind people, whether in China or the West or elsewhere, that we have to understand one another, and treat one another with compassion. We have to see humanity as one.’  

‘Ai Weiwei: Making Sense’ is showing from 7 April – 30 July at Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High Street, London W8

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aiweiwei.com

Ai Weiwei is staging an art performance at London’s Hyde Park this Saturday (10 December 2022), signing blank sheets of A4 paper with invisible UV ink and distributing them free from 2-4 pm at Speakers’ Corner. 

The event is the renowned Chinese artist and dissident’s way of recognising Human Rights Day, which marks the anniversary of the drafting of the University Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It’s an occasion ‘to review and re-understand the meaning and value of human rights’, he explains in an interview with Wallpaper*.

The issue of human rights is personal to Ai. ‘My father [the eminent poet and activist Ai Qing] was exiled as a dissident since my birth. When I was born, I was already a political refugee in my home country. It was only when I was forced to leave China in 2015 and move to Europe that I fully understood this,’ he explains.

His arrival in Europe coincided with a new global refugee crisis, largely prompted by the Syrian civil war. The events inspired him to make the 2017 documentary film Human Flow, shot in over 20 countries to convey the staggering scale of forced migration. ‘In this time of uncertainty, we need more tolerance, compassion and trust for each other since we are all one,’ he wrote in his director’s statement.

While Ai has been steadfast in his championing of refugee rights, producing two further documentaries (2018’s The Rest, about the disintegrating humanitarian aid system in Europe, and 2021’s Rohingya, focusing on the eponymous ethnic group forced out of Myanmar), and speaking about the issue worldwide, he observes that the plight of refugees has only exacerbated.

‘In 2017, there were around 65 million refugees worldwide. Today there are more than 100 million refugees.

‘The refugee issue, once in the media spotlight, has become marginal nowadays. Very few people are concerned about the political situation in Afghanistan [following the Taliban takeover]. Meanwhile, the continuing Russian invasion of Ukraine has made Europe the place of origin for refugees for the first time [in many years].’

Asked if there are reasons for optimism, Ai appears despondent. ‘With ongoing wars, poverty aggravated by the Covid pandemic, food crisis, and all kinds of political instability, the refugee crisis will only get worse.’

Still, he is insistent on doing his part to alleviate the situation. That Refugee International – a Washington DC-based non-profit that advocates for lifesaving assistance, human rights, and protection for displaced people around the world – appointed Ai to its board this November is a reflection of the artist’s stature as a humanitarian. ‘For me, this is an honour and a spur, prompting me to do more things for the same ideals,’ he explains.

The event this Saturday will take place at Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner, the oldest living free speech platform in the world, where the likes of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and George Orwell have publicly expressed their political opinions. It’s ‘a place that is related to history,’ says Ai.

The blank sheets of paper that Ai is distributing are an homage to recent protests in China, prompted by the persistence of stringent Covid restrictions at a time when most of the world has reopened, but also expressing frustration at a general lack of freedom under the rule of President Xi Jinping, who secured an unprecedented third term as the country’s leader this October. The absence of text on these sheets offers a silent but powerful critique of a harsh censorship regime. 

‘A blank piece of paper as a symbol of resistance is ironic,’ describes Ai. ‘It appeared in protests in Russia, in Hong Kong, and now in China. It is almost not saying anything, but there is a strong moral power; under the condition of not saying anything, everything has been said.

‘Expression has become an extremely difficult thing in authoritarian societies. In China, those students and young people who stood up and resisted were arrested and disappeared. In a society without judicial independence, they are in a dangerous situation.’

The UV ink is likewise a comment on the difficulty of political expression. ‘Even if you do express, it is like you have not expressed. The state of free expression is extremely fragile at the moment; if written under unusual circumstances such as UV ink, it is almost not existing,’ adds the artist. 

He is pragmatic in his assessment of the impact that this event can have: ‘I don’t think my act can change the world in any real sense, but it is an attitude and a direction. I am very concerned with the resistance and turmoil in China and share the same feelings of anxiety and confusion with any kind of resistance. It is only through a symbolic act that I can be part of it.’

Following Saturday’s event, Ai will sell further editions of his UV ink signature on blank A4 paper on Maybe.art, the independent display and retail space run by his partner, Wang Fen. These are available for £100 until 20 December 2022, with full proceeds going to Refugee International.

In Ai’s view, that many parts of the world are going through difficult times, thanks to rapidly rising costs of living and an impending recession, is reason to double down on activism. ‘Today in the UK, in Europe and in the US, we are at a moment that might be a turning point,’ he concludes. ‘If we are not concerned about people’s basic rights and insist on free speech at this moment, we are all in the process of becoming refugees and losing our basic rights.’

Ai Weiwei is at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, London on 10 December 2022, from 2-4pm. Following the event, the signed edition (£100) will be available for sale on maybe.art until 20 December 2022, with all proceeds donated to Refugee International.

 refugeesinternational.org ; maybe.art

Tomorrow’s Tigers 2022 is a major fundraising project organised by WWF (Worldwide Fund for Nature). Comprising a selling exhibition, it will feature specially commissioned, limited-edition art rugs by 12 major international artists. Highlights include a limited-edition piece designed by Peter Doig and a one-off art rug by Ai Weiwei. 

Tomorrow’s Tigers 2022 marks a new phase in the critically acclaimed project, conceived and curated by Artwise Curators, in collaboration with specialist rug brand Christopher Farr. 

Featured artists behind the colourful rugs are Ai Weiwei, Francesco Clemente, Peter Doig, Bernard Frize, Gary Hume, Reena Saini Kallat, Anish Kapoor, Maya Lin, Harland Miller, Raqib Shaw, Kiki Smith and Rose Wylie.

The initiative seeks to highlight the ongoing and critical threat to wild tiger populations and WWF’s efforts to remedy the decline. Coinciding with the Lunar Year of the Tiger and the global TX2 pledge to double tiger numbers by the end of 2022, an exhibition of the art rugs will be held at Sotheby’s, London from 24-29 November 2022. The rugs will be available to buy through the website of Art for Your World, an organisation working with the art world to help tackle the climate and nature crisis.

Excluding the unique design by Ai Weiwei, the commissioned rugs are each made in a limited edition run of up to ten and will be on sale at prices ranging from £10,000 to £150,000.

‘I wanted to have a rug made that would respond and refer to the magical Tibetan tiger rugs that were partly the inspiration for this project. It is terrifying how few tigers are left in the wild and the thought of them one day only existing in captivity is truly tragic,’ says Peter Doig of his new rug, Tiger Fight. ‘My imagery takes its tigers from an existing rug but adds a narrative that could be about a fight for survival or being made to perform in some grotesque circus with an abstracted human crowd looking on. The phenomenal craftsmanship and skill in the making of these rugs and the brilliant interpretation of my painting before this makes for a really collaborative endeavor.’ 

Tomorrow’s Tigers, Curated by Artwise for WWF, 24.11.22 – 29.11.22 At Sotheby’s London 34-35 New Bond Street London W1A 2AA UK. artforyourworld.wwf.org.uk

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Ai Weiwei is known for many things; glass, until now, has not been one of them. But a major show in Venice is putting the artist’s first-ever sculptures in glass centre stage, following a three-year project conceived in Murano. As Ai said of the material, ‘Glass, a special material and a part of our daily life, bears witness to joy, anxiety and worry in our reality. In its presence, we reflect upon the relationships between life and death, and between tradition and reality.’

Running alongside the 59th Venice Art Biennale and created in collaboration with Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore-Benedicti Claustra Onlus, Berengo Studio and Fondazione Berengo, the exhibition uses expertly crafted glass to convey the radical, subversive themes for which Ai is best known: increasingly fragile, polarised societies, ever-fraught relationship with natural ecosystems, and the darker, lesser documented corners of history. 

Against the dramatic setting of Venice’s Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, the show’s pièce de résistance is La Commedia Umana, a 9m-high suspended sculpture involving 2,000 pieces of black glass handcrafted by the maestros of Berengo Studio in Murano. The twisting, cascading chandelier-like sculpture – one of the largest hanging sculptures made in Murano glass in living history – is a sinister theatre of objects including bones, organs, bats and surveillance cameras. 

‘This vast hanging sculpture in black glass defies definition, nothing like it has ever really been seen or realised before. Part of its beauty is it remains a mystery, a human tragedy, a comedy, a tangled mess that we each must seek to unwind in our own time,’ Adriano Berengo, founder of Berengo Studio and Fondazione Berengo, said in a statement. ‘It is a work that stirs emotions, that forces us to come to terms not only with our own mortality but with the part our lives have to play in the greater theatre of human history.’ 

La Commedia Umana, which debuted in Rome earlier this year, sits alongside eight new glass works, including Brainless Figure in Glass, 2022, a self-portrait conceived through modern technology and manual sculpting, and everyday objects, such as Glass Takeout Box, 2022, a symbol of globalisation (first created as a marble piece in 2015), and Glass Toilet Paper, 2022. As well as the artist’s glass debut, the show also features some of the artist’s greatest, and most recent hits in porcelain, wood and Lego.

A film chronicles the installation of Ai Weiwei's glass sculpture La Commedia Umana in Venice

INFORMATION

Ai Weiwei, 'La Commedia Umana – Memento Mori' runs from 28 August - 27 November 2022 at Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore. 

ADDRESS

Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore
Island of San Giorgio Maggiore
30124 Venezia

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An angular, linear volume has been peaking out from the green, rolling hills of Salt Point, New York. It is the artful extension to an existing weekend residence, and it has been created by New York architecture studio Reddymade and Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. The new minimalist escape has a distinctive form that complements the original home's cluster of hexagonal pavilions, creating a complex that is a real feast of geometries and a sculptural, exciting piece of architecture. 

‘The extension was designed to be strikingly simple and minimal, which is reflected not only in its graphic language, but also in its materiality,’ explains Reddymade founder Suchi Reddy. ‘The metal rib exterior allows for a crisp edge, and ensures project longevity. Through its materiality, it also has a relationship with the previously completed Artfarm on the property,’ he adds referring to a gallery building.

The project contains a simple domestic programme – two bedrooms and a living space at the structure’s heart. The bedrooms flank the communal spaces, occupying the edges of a gently bent linear footprint. Clean, crisp white surfaces inside make the eye focus on the art dotting the interiors, while the large, picture frame windows draw the gaze towards the gardens outside and the nature beyond. ‘We intentionally kept a minimal material palette to provide a neutral and light setting for artworks and furniture from the client’s private collection,’ continues Reddy. 

Weiwei and Reddy share a similar approach to art and an interest in poetry, she explains, which ‘made it a joy to collaborate’. Treating the minimalist escape as a functional piece of spatial design but at the same time, an art form, was key to the design process, and to identifying the right solutions that feel appropriate to the site and the client’s needs.

‘Its simplicity and clarity of concept makes it special. It is about adding an object to the property, on which the clients have installed sculptural artworks. The extension has its own sculptural quality, but simultaneously doesn't feel like a showpiece. It's humble,’ Reddy concludes. 

INFORMATION

rmdny.com

Experiencing the art of Ai Weiwei is like biting into a scorpion. Plenty of sting, searingly sharp, and hard to swallow. And so it should be. The divisive Chinese artist has dedicated his life, career and freedom to exploring some of the most pertinent issues facing humanity. From his bold and unwavering criticism of censorship and authoritarianism in his native country to documenting the escalating migrant crisis, cultural stereotypes, and the darker caverns of history. 

Experiencing the art of Ai Weiwei is also cathartic. He is an artist of resilience, vision, optimism and undeniable wit. His art dares to dream of a world where speech has freedom, equality reigns, power is held to account and satire can roam free. 

Through film, installation, sculpture, performance, photography, and almost any other medium art has in its toolbox, Ai has invited those who see his work to walk, if for a moment, in another’s shoes. 

The stately rural haven of Blenheim Palace might feel like a far cry from the subjects Ai has often turned his attention to, but his relationship with the palace runs deep. In 2014, he became the first contemporary artist in Blenheim’s 300-year history to make the palace his canvas. The show was a courageous move from its host, and as one might imagine, conventions were kept to a minimum. Ai placed handcuffs on the bed in Winston Churchill’s Birth Room, introduced the Long Library to 40 photographs of him ‘giving the finger’ to global institutions, and let loose a plague of porcelain crabs in the Red Drawing Room. Less conventional still was the fact that the show was organised remotely while Ai was barred from leaving China by authorities. 

Recently, Gilded Cage – Ai's imposing interactive sculpture exploring the physical and ideological constraints of refugees – has been installed on long-term view in the palace's grounds. We took the opportunity to speak to the artist, via Zoom, about his extraordinary life and work, and his long-awaited memoir, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, published by Penguin Random House.

Wallpaper*: Where are you as we speak? 

Ai Weiwei: In Portugal. This is one day before my largest exhibition ever [‘Rapture’ at Cordoaria Nacional, Lisbon]. It’s about 40,000 sq m.

I bought a property in Portugal and I now consider Portugal to be a place I will settle in. I’ve been pushed out of China for six years. I spent five years in Berlin, and some time in the UK in Cambridge, where my son still studies. Now, since the pandemic, I’ve been in Portugal for a simple reason: plenty of sunshine. 

W*: How are you finding your new home?

AW: I’m kind of a political refugee. Once you’ve left your home, either you’re home, or you’re a foreigner outside of your home. So I choose a place simply by instinct. I like a place to have sunshine. You open the door and see the sun, you open the window and see the sun, and you don’t feel depressed, you feel something you can trust in: nature. The sun given to us is so generous, but living in the city, we forget. 

This is a natural life, it’s not a city struggle. It’s very peaceful, and at my age, 64, you need a moment to be alone. 

W*: Gilded Cage (2017), which has just been installed at Blenheim Palace confronts the international migrant crisis and lots of your previous work has centred on identity, displacement and inequality. Why are you so passionate about these issues?

AW: It’s like the Yin and Yang: there are the fortunate ones, and the not so fortunate. I have had a lot of unfortunate experiences, I grew up with my father in exile for 20 years, so I know what it’s like. As humanity, we always have to think as ‘one’, so there’s always ‘fortunate ones’ and ‘unfortunate ones’. But we’re basically the same. 

If we go to the refugee camps, we see the little girls and boys, and they’re so smart. Their lives have the same meaning, but if we don’t provide very simple opportunities – like education and nutrition – it just becomes a waste. Their whole lives, millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people, living under those kinds of conditions, given no hope. 

[For me] it’s become a responsibility. It’s not mercy or some kind of compassion, it’s become, ‘do you really think you’re a good person’ or ‘do you really not care at all?’ It’s a challenge. As an artist, I cannot avoid a conscience, so I ask myself the same question. I make films, and exhibitions to introduce the institutions to the so-called liberal world, to say ‘we’re responsible’ and ‘we’re not as free as we think’. 

W*: Were there any specific enclosures or cages it was inspired by?

AW: Yes, when I made the film Human Flow (2017), I based it on 40 [refugee] camps from the Syrian border to the Egypt border, the Turkish border, Lebanon, Jordan, and Myanmar. 

[The film asked] ‘what’s it like being someone forced away from their home?’, ‘How do they live?’, ‘What kind of future do they have?’ 

So I got all these not-very-beautiful images. What I remember most vividly are several locations; one is the US border with Mexico. You can see one side is so rich and plentiful, and the other side is so desperate, you always question ‘why is it like that?’. And also in Israel on the West Bank, people have to go through these jail-like fences. They’re very narrow and very long. The Palestinian people have to get jobs, and they have to wait in there for hours. I don’t know why they make the fences so narrow; people are compressed like sardines. I think about the psychological warfare that makes people feel unimportant: ‘I’m the master of you’, ‘I decide your life’. So that’s not fantasy, it's reality, so I made a little fence, a cage, that you can go in and out of; it could only take 20 or 30 seconds. It’s a sculpture, an installation, a little modern instrument [to show] how humans treat others. 

W*: The work was previously on view in New York’s Central Park. 

AW: Yes, it was in Central Park, near 59th Street, a few blocks away from Trump Plaza. 

W*: Was that intentional placement?

AW: I liked that placement because New York is a city for rich and powerful people. And of course, today if you’re powerful, somehow you will understand the cage. Either you cage others, or you can be caged. 

Building Ai Weiwei’s Gilded Cage at Blenheim Palace. Videography by Pete Seaward, produced by Blenheim Art Foundation

W*: Installing Gilded Cage at Blenheim is a bit of a homecoming for your work. You were the first contemporary artist to ever exhibit there, but you were detained in China at the time. What was the experience like?

AW: With every opportunity that comes, I say to myself, ‘this will be my last show’. So I always make maximum effort, because, who knows, I could be locked up in jail for the next ten years. Whether it’s a large project, or a small project, it’s the same feeling. Life is short. 

W*: The history of Blenheim is complex. It provided a refuge for 400 evacuated children during WW2. It also symbolises a certain British elitism and exclusion, yet it also stages radical contemporary art. What does Blenheim mean to you, both as a place and what it represents? 

AW: Blenheim has a very historical figure in [Winston] Churchill and also represents Britain’s struggle in modern times. Some were intelligent moves, some are maybe questionable, but the struggle is real. And that kind of struggle, we cannot replace it. History only teaches us how difficult [a place] freedom has come from. 

W*: That’s interesting. I suppose what Blenheim has done by exhibiting contemporary art, is open itself up to analysis, and perhaps criticism, of its history. 

AW: I think they are brave. My show was their first, and they’re always a little bit controversial. I asked them to place handcuffs on the bed inside Churchill’s bedroom and they accepted. I can see the grandchildren of Churchill are so open-minded; they have great humour. 

When I tried to hang Study of Perspective – 40 photographs in which I held my middle finger up at 40 different famous locations – in Churchill’s library, the photos were larger than the library bookcases, so we wondered how to hang them because nothing seemed possible. So they said ‘why don’t you hang them this way [landscape]’? So all of the fingers now pointed like this [horizontal]. I love that kind of response – to trust the artist and just let something happen in this ‘historical readymade’. They [have] respect, and also see the possibility to integrate contemporary culture. I think that takes some courage and it made the show very meaningful for me. 

Normally with heritage and history, we think we shouldn’t touch it, but we should touch it, otherwise we are not existing. 

W*: What was the first piece of art you remember seeing, and how did it make you feel?

AW: The first piece of art I can memorise was by my father. He was an artist that studied in Paris, and was exiled for 20 years since the year I was born. We were in Xinjiang, the province of the Uyghur people and the Gobi Desert where he was doing hard labour. There was a black hole in the landscape, and we lived in this home for five years. 

W*: You’ve got a picture of that home as your phone screensaver, that’s quite powerful. 

AW: That was my palace. This home was like the moment, if you remember, when the US Army pulled out the Iraq leader Saddam Hussein [who was in hiding] from the ground. It’s an awful image, but we lived in a hole like that with my father. Now you understand that the palace means something very different to me. 

But the first piece of art I remember. My father was cleaning public toilets for 200 farmers. It was very dirty, there was no water, no roof, and awful flies. This was a punishment to insult him. My father was a poet. You can see what kind of struggle he’d been through because he was a writer. 

He was the most important writer in China but he was forbidden to write for 20 years. For a writer, this was the best time, from [the age of] 47 to 67, and he was not allowed to touch a pen. So once, he grabbed a pencil and drew a flower in front of me. I saw the magic happen. At that time, he was an old man who was supposed to clean the toilets. I never knew he could draw, and he just drew and the lines were so beautiful. That makes me feel like art is about real life, it’s about the reality, it belongs to our heart. 

W*: What’s the most challenging art project you’ve ever worked on?

AW: My most challenging project also relates to my father [the Chinese poet, Ai Qing]. In 2011, I was detained [by the Chinese authorities]. In detention, I realised I knew him very little because I’d never really asked him a question. There were so many questions in my mind, but when he was alive, somehow I didn’t ask them. I was stupid, I was not conscious, and now I will never get a solid answer. 

The police told me I could face ten years of imprisonment. So suddenly, I felt sad because my son was only just over two years old. The prison guard said to me, ‘after certain years, you come out of jail and your son won’t recognise you’. That is very hard. One day, I [decided] to write a book about what was happening, so my son knew his grandfather and his father, from their own words, because there could be a lot of publications using their own words. 

So that project has taken the last ten years, and the memoir will be published on 2 November (2021), it’s called 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, published by Random House. It’s taken a lot of effort to write this book.

INFORMATION

Gilded Cage is now on long-term view at Blenheim Palace. blenheimpalace.com

Ai Weiwei, 'Rapture', until 28 November 2021, Cordoaria Nacional - Galeria do Torreão Nascente, Lisbon.

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir, by Ai Weiwei, is out now, published by penguin.co.uk

Locals say that glass, not blood, runs through the veins of Murano’s highly skilled glassmakers, who are notoriously coy about their trade. From the chemical compositions that make up their unique glass to the blowing techniques that are passed down through generations, everything is a closely guarded secret and competition is tough. 

This is why, industry insiders say, it has taken the city of Venice until 2017 to establish its first ever dedicated glass week. Running from 10–17 September, Venice Glass Week was a city-wide celebration of the Venetian Lagoon’s 1,000-year glassmaking heritage. It's a celebration that is much needed. 

Since the 1960s, glass production in Venice has been in decline as markets have shifted. Today, the 60 or so furnaces that populate the city have become more focused on producing one-off bespoke glass art works rather than mass-produced designs that can be made more cheaply in China. Modern technology has not changed production processes at these very traditional furnaces. Work is hard and laborious; with techniques taking years to learn, it has also been increasingly tough to attract young apprentices who are willing to dedicate their lives to the art.

‘I think the Venice Glass Week is fantastic,’ says Simone Giovanni Cenedese, one of Murano’s youngest maestri. ‘I think it’s a very good idea to promote glass collectively. A lot of companies have been interested [in the Glass Week] and I’ve been surprised. I didn’t think that they would be that open. The participation has been impressive.’

During the inaugural Venice Glass Week, 150 events took place across the city including exhibitions, seminars, workshops, activities and performances – a busy programme that was made possible thanks to the cooperation of three of Venice’s principal cultural institutions: the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia; the Fondazione Giorgio Cini; and the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti. Also involved were the guardians of original Murano artistic glass production, the Consorzio Promovetro Murano.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Venice Glass Week website

Some of the largest architecture projects in the world are taking shape in a ground-floor atelier tucked away in London’s King’s Cross. Thomas Heatherwick set up his studio in 1994 after studying at Manchester Polytechnic and the RCA, and over the years he gradually scaled up its output, creating everything from furniture and installations through to buses, bridges, art museums and whole city blocks. Heatherwick now works alongside around 200 designers, 130 of whom have architectural training. The studio output is focused on big buildings. These include one of the largest mixed-use projects in China, a key component of a vast US private development, a California office for a tech colossus, and a new bridge for London, all of which are at various stages of planning and construction.

Despite this mega-structural ambition, every Heatherwick project can be infinitely zoomed into, right down to the smallest design component. This combination of scale and detail comes out of an absolute commitment to process, something that becomes evident the minute you sit down with Heatherwick to talk about his work... Read the interview in full here

In 20 remarkable years we have come across, written about, examined and exhumed a lot of remarkable people. On the following pages are 20 of them. This, though, is not a simple ranking of power and influence. These are stories that resonate, with which we find common purpose and cause.

Here are people who have sometimes stuck bloody-mindedly to a course, sometimes pivoted, re-examined and pushed in new directions, who have defied expectations and even open derision. They have shown courage under fire and grace under pressure.

They have transformed – from girl group popette to one of the fashion industry's smartest operators, for instance – and, over the last 20 years, have had a transformative influence in their field. Here are architects who build with a sense of the immaterial, artists who want to talk to everyone, experimentalists and food engineers, fashion designers who defy fashion and bob and weave like prize fighters, tech titans who have changed the way we do almost everything. One reinvented the hotel industry, another presents it with an existential threat. There is also a man who wants to save the world – or take us all to Mars if that doesn't work out. Either way, we'll be along for the ride.

Victoria Beckham’s transformation from pop celebrity and tabloid icon to the force behind a covetable fashion line is an extraordinary one. Indeed, when the Spice Girls burst onto the cultural landscape in 1996, it would have seemed unlikely that 20 years later she would be presiding over a label now fêted for its sleek, restrained lines.

But to hear Victoria Beckham tell it, she didn’t have ‘any grand expectations’ when making the transition from music to fashion. ‘I was just focused on creating clothes that I felt proud of and passionate about,’ says Beckham of launching her eponymous line in 2008. ‘The fact that the brand has since taken off in the way it has has been very humbling.’

Now, the label boasts its own handsome flagship store on London’s Dover Street, counts Net-A-Porter, Liberty and Barneys among its many stockists, and recorded a turnover of £34m in 2014.

But the signals that Beckham had an affinity for design were there at the start. She was the stylish Spice Girl who stood out amid her flashier bandmates. As her and her husband David’s fame grew, they embraced their roles as fashion plates with a mutual fondness for Gucci and Versace... Read the interview in full here

The year Wallpaper* launched, a 28-year-old Jonathan Ive was appointed as Apple’s design director. ‘Our goal is figuring out how we can bring meaning to objects,’ he told us a year later. He ticked that box. ‘Think of Apple as a product company whose primary goal is to make the very best products we can,’ he told us back in 2010. But six years is a long time in technology, and services, software, apps and interaction arguably play a far greater role in how we use our devices today. The intuitive elegance that has marked Ive’s designs is now harder to achieve...

The year Wallpaper* launched, a 28-year-old Jonathan Ive was appointed as Apple’s design director. ‘Our goal is figuring out how we can bring meaning to objects,’ he told us a year later. He ticked that box. ‘Think of Apple as a product company whose primary goal is to make the very best products we can,’ he told us back in 2010. But six years is a long time in technology, and services, software, apps and interaction arguably play a far greater role in how we use our devices today. The intuitive elegance that has marked Ive’s designs is now harder to achieve.

Hard but not impossible. ‘Far from being mutually exclusive, technology and craft are not at odds,’ he says. Apple knows this like no other, and that’s largely down to Ive’s status as a titan of exceptional user design. ‘Much like beauty and utility,’ he says, ‘[technology and craft are] all the more powerful in combination.’ Ive and Apple are another such supercharged blend

Most people steal things from hotels. Few try to steal an entire hotel. But that’s what happened to Ian Schrager. Just weeks after he opened the Edition in Waikiki, the owner of the building turned up in the middle of the night, changed the locks on the front doors and told the staff they worked for him now, not Schrager’s company. The episode neatly, if rather dramatically, sums up the man who has transformed hotels.

Over the past 30 years, Schrager has reinvented hotels and then reinvented them some more, and each time he has done so, his rivals, big and small, have stolen his ideas wholesale. At Morgans, the Royalton, the Paramount and the Hudson in New York and, along the way, the Delano in Miami, the Clift in San Francisco, the Mondrian in LA, and St Martin’s Lane and the Sanderson in London, he created the boutique hotel. It got the name not because it was small, but because it was curated with a strong attitude and aesthetic, like a fashion boutique.

The key ingredients are the lobby scene, the go-to bar, the must-book restaurant for guests and locals alike, the signature scents, the hot staff with clothes more expensive than the guests’, the cool nightclub, the sense of an urban resort, the CD collection and the baffling taps in the bathrooms. There’s scarcely a hotel on the planet whose design or service has not borrowed some or all of these elements. ‘They pickpocket my ideas,’ Schrager says. ‘I still get annoyed by it, especially when I see things that we laboured and agonised over that have now become standard. The bed with the low headboard with the light behind, it’s everywhere...’ Read the interview in full here

Airbnb confounds for many reasons, though the most obvious one is that its success is based on a business model that ignores one of the first lessons we learn at our mother’s knee: don’t talk to strangers. We can only imagine what the first few investor meetings in 2008 must have been like.

And yet, fast forward nine years and the website – essentially a match-making service between home-owners and visitors looking for an alternative to hotel rooms – has already hosted 123 million nights. It’s also in the midst of seeking additional funding, valuing the company at $30bn – making it the second highest-valued start-up in the US behind Uber.

And like Uber, Airbnb has become a poster-child for the sharing economy, that nebulous but extremely valuable intersection between commerce and human connection. It has recast the idea of privacy, security and personal space. And all because Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, two graduates from the Rhode Island School of Design, found a way to take the components of trust between people who had never met, and design for it. ‘We didn’t come up with anything new,’ says Gebbia, now chief product officer. ‘There were many websites like ours. Why did ours take off? Luck and timing played a part. The 2008 recession led people to consider new ways of earning supplemental income. But I believe the key difference was design...’ Read the interview in full here

Therme Vals was completed in 1996, the same year this magazine was founded. It was clearly a good year. Two decades on, Peter Zumthor’s genre-defining spa in the Swiss canton of Graubünden remains a place of pilgrimage for architecture enthusiasts the world over. And Zumthor is now one of the world’s most sought-after architects.

Zumthor is not your typical internationally-operating, Pritzker Prize-winning architect, even if there is such a thing. He has no offices in London, New York or Zurich, preferring instead to base himself in the tiny Swiss hamlet of Haldenstein, where he has lived and worked for more than 40 years. At his atelier, staff are not found glued to shiny Apple Macs but gathered around physical models of buildings – working prototypes lifted up on stilts to eye level – while beyond those models, breathtaking wraparound views stretch out across the Grisonian Rhine Valley. The practice is small, deliberately limited to around 30 people, making it a necessity to be very choosy about the projects it takes on. Which is what makes it really different.

Looking back over the last 20 years since Therme, the projects Zumthor has designed have been dictated not by commercial opportunity, but by where architecture can make a real difference to the human experience. Where architecture can bring joy, peace, insight or energy. You know you’re in a Zumthor building not because you notice any trademark shapes or materials, but because of how it makes you feel... Read the interview in full here

It is now the norm for fashion designers to dabble in other forms. Hedi Slimane, Rick Owens, Karl Lagerfeld and JW Anderson are all serious, serial dabblers. This is the age of the new polymath, the cross-disciplinary curator, the imperial taste-maker. But there is one designer who has gone much further; who, over the last 20 years, has relocated fashion, pulled it out of its self-referential loops and plugged it into a larger, more powerful network of ideas and influences.

Raf Simons originally trained in industrial and furniture design in Genk, Belgium – the country where he was born and raised and where his eponymous menswear line is based. After interning with Walter Van Beirendonck and then watching a Martin Margiela show in Paris, which Simons has described as nothing short of a revelation, he turned instead to fashion. He founded his own label in 1995.

That unconventional start explains Simons’ mould-breaking approach to designing clothing. ‘I always wanted to find other ways, explore other ways,’ he says. Focusing on menswear, Simons has subtly and insistently proposed new ways of dressing men. His radicalism has not only affected the way entire generations of men dress, but how generations of fashion designers create their clothes. The designs of youthful labels like Hood By Air or Off-White are tied up with ideas Simons has explored over the past 20 years... Read the interview in full here

Alessandro Michele’s Gucci is a harbinger of change in the fashion industry. In barely 18 months, his work has perceptibly moved goalposts and his impact is hard to overstate, certainly when it comes to recent fashion. Indeed, you’d have to dive back to the 1990s to find anything similar. Ironically, if you do so, you’ll find it was once again at Gucci that the status quo shifted, under the tenure of Tom Ford. Exactly 20 years apart, both used the Italian leather goods behemoth to ring in the changes, to provoke, challenge and ultimately seduce. Both have proved, within the space of mere seasons, to be the dominant fashion stories of their respective periods.

Michele and Ford’s visions for Gucci, on the surface, are polar opposites. Indeed, Michele’s obsession is with elaborating his surfaces, in homage to the Italiano eccentrico styles commonly associated with designers like Walter Albini, the interwar couturier Elsa Schiaparelli or the Milanese fashion editor Anna Piaggi. It stands in stark contrast to Ford’s midcentury modern-tinged minimalism, the sartorial equivalent of an Eames lounger, of lean tailoring and jersey evening dresses with insets of metal. Slick was the word most often used to describe Ford’s vision for Gucci, from the shiny polished catwalks of his biannual shows through to the glistening double-G insignias dripping from bags and belts. There’s nothing slick about what Michele does – it’s more sick, a mix of oddball references and strange proportions that have some beauty to them, to hamfistedly paraphrase Sir Francis Bacon... Read the interview in full here

Towering above his employees and most of his guests, with flowing locks and a beard as white as his linen trousers and moccasins, Brazilian mining magnate and modern-day Medici Bernardo Paz looks a little like God as he goes about his mission of building heaven on earth.

In Paz’s contemporary garden of Eden, Inhotim, every detail has been designed to reset the way visitors live their lives. The sprawling utopia, an hour from his home town of Belo Horizonte and designed as a perfect marriage of art, nature and architecture, is much more than a playground for an eccentric millionaire. It’s Paz’s gift to the world – a beautiful, peaceful place from a man whose name means peace. Mines, as the inhabitants of Paz’s home state of Minas Gerais know only too well, are a finite resource, and the Mineiros, as the locals are known, have seen their riches shipped off to the world for nearly two centuries – with all too little to show for it.

Paz has turned the concept of one-off extraction on its head, using the wealth accumulated from gouging iron ore from the mountains that surround Belo Horizonte to plant the seeds of a contemporary crop, one he believes will bear fruit ‘for a thousand years’. The profits – more than $250m – generated from shipping three million tonnes of iron ore a year to mills in Brazil and China, are ploughed into his dream.

‘I want to create a state of mind,’ he says. ‘The hardest thing is to change the way people see the world, but beauty changes people’s lives...’ Read the interview in full here

By the early 1990s, Kazuyo Sejima already had experience at Toyo Ito’s office, her own studio and a Young Architect of the Year award from the Japan Institute of Architects under her belt. But it was after setting up SANAA (with Ryue Nishizawa) in 1995 that her career really took off, upscaling to major cultural commissions which transformed her into an international go-to choice for mesmerisingly barely-there, ethereal architecture.

Her signature style of strong shapes and clean lines that at the same time appear flowing and delicate has helped define 21st-century Japanese architecture. It is all about the experience for Sejima, although priorities have shifted somewhat since her early days in practice. ‘Our designs are not driven by what you can do with architecture itself, but by an interest in the way people experience space as a relationship between programme, city and surrounding landscape,’ she says. ‘In the past, I would try to understand the overall character of a building’s environment and use this abstract idea to develop a design. Today, I try to create spaces that are more precisely adapted to the variable character of a neighbourhood...’ Read the interview in full here

There was a time when Japanese food meant exactly the same thing wherever you were, whatever the occasion and budget: sashimi, teppanyaki, sushi, teriyaki and tempura. In the 1990s, however, Nobuyuki Matsuhisa changed all that when he launched his deliriously inventive spin on classic Japanese tropes layered with nuanced South American influences, Peruvian specifically – yellowtail sashimi jalapeño and tempura eel, for instance.

From the start, a strong stylish streak has run through all of Matsuhisa’s projects. When the first Nobu opened in New York in 1994, he tapped David Rockwell for the interiors. ‘I explained to David the importance of the flow of the kitchen and the connection between the kitchen and the sushi bar. He understood both what I wanted and my style of cooking, and was able to translate my vision into a beautiful restaurant.’

It’s a formula that Matsuhisa has repeated over the years with great success. Within a few months of the first issue of Wallpaper*, he partnered with Robert De Niro, restaurateur Drew Nieporent, and Singaporean hotelier Christina Ong to open his first European outpost in London’s Metropolitan Hotel. Nobu London was the proverbial instant success. Every night, the deliberately austere dining room was mobbed by the city’s beau monde – every table swooning over the celebrated (and much imitated) black cod and miso. Within a year, it owned a Michelin star... Read the interview in full here

Illustration: Eoin Ryan

To paraphrase Sinatra, 1996 was a very good year. Wallpaper* was launched, Richard Geoffroy was promoted to chef de cave at Dom Pérignon and, very appropriately, that year produced an extraordinary vintage that, two decades on, is still talked about. ‘Normally, the great wines come from the fine sunny weather. It was the wind that year,’ Geoffroy explains. ‘It drove the dehydration of the grapes and concentrated the juices to produce something baffling, energised, constrained and infinitely youthful.’

On paper, Geoffroy’s credentials are impressive enough – born into a champagne-making family, he is a trained medical doctor and an influential oenologist. In person, he is articulate, smart, jovial, disciplined and passionate about the art of winemaking.

His extraordinary niceness makes it easy to overlook the fact that Geoffroy is an industry powerhouse. He says his relationship with Dom Pérignon is so intimate a line cannot be drawn. ‘We share the same sense of playfulness, completeness, complexity and serenity. Our fundamental core is one of harmony, which is expressed in the tension between winemaking and blending. But we are not flash or ego-driven...' Read the interview in full here

Co-founder of Google with Sergey Brin, CEO of Alphabet and the man behind Mountain View’s ongoing and relentless diversification into every single stratum of our tech-centric lives, Larry Page can lay claim to some serious data. Google is, of course, named for a number – a very big number – so it’s appropriate that any stats culled from the company’s day-to-day operations are suitably mind-boggling. Here are the facts and figures that prove Page will influence our intelligence for decades to come. The man behind the world’s biggest tech influencer conjures up serious stats. See them here...

It’s not a coincidence that, as Hussein Chalayan was presenting his first collections, the first issue of Wallpaper* was also taking shape in London. The designer has been vocal about the impact the magazine and the city had on him from the start. ‘For me, Wallpaper* was where all the different disciplines and facets of lifestyle merged,’ he says. ‘It was a publication that really gelled that together. My interests already included interiors and furniture, so I understood straight away its role in creating a synergy between fashion, interiors, food and travel. They were more isolated before, and I think the magazine is responsible for creating these bridges.’

London in those days ‘was about different creatives working together; there was a very distinct correlation between music and fashion’. Chalayan often collaborated with the singer Björk, who modelled in one of his early shows and famously wore a piece from the designer’s Airmail collection on the cover of her album, Post. ‘In terms of what inspired me, it was mostly music and cultural history...’ Read the interview in full here

Working with Ai Weiwei was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. Partly because we had barely a year to make a major exhibition at the RA, but mainly because he’s a profound, uncompromising and heroic individual whose humanity and humour are never far away.

Outside his studio in Caochangdi – a kind of artists’ village in Beijing – the street is lined with surveillance cameras, each one festooned with a red Chinese lantern by Weiwei, the most gentle of subversions. A bike was chained to the lamppost outside the main door – and it had a fresh bunch of flowers in its basket every day until he got his passport back. For most of the time we were working together, it seemed unlikely he would be able to come to London. I went to Beijing five times over the year and every trip I’d ask whether there was any change in attitude from the Chinese authorities. ‘I always remain optimistic, but every time I think the police might return my passport I am disappointed. Perhaps I am naive,’ he told me.

I remembered his exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale, soon after his release from prison, where his mother had come instead. Would she, I wondered, be able to come to London if he were unable to travel. ‘She’s too frail now,’ he said. ‘How about your son?’ I asked. ‘I know he’s only six, but maybe he would like to come.’ ‘My son hates London,’ he told me, rather devastatingly. ‘When I was imprisoned I didn’t want him to know details, so he was told Daddy is in London...’ Read the interview in full here

When it comes to supporting the arts, few patrons have made as big a name for themselves as the Miami-based real-estate developer Jorge M Pérez. Founder of the Related Group, part of the property powerhouse behind ambitious urban development projects such as New York’s Hudson Yards, Pérez has not only played a huge part in shaping the modern Miami skyline, but also left his mark on its cultural landscape as well.

In 2013, Pérez’s name became a talking point during the relocation of the Miami Art Museum to a swanky, waterfront home designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Along with its expanded, $220m building, the museum also unveiled a new name: the Pérez Art Museum Miami, an acknowledgement of the $40m donation from the billionaire. Although the naming was unorthodox, PAMM (as it’s affectionately known), has evolved from a municipal-level arts institution to a respected fixture in the international arts scene. Shows have included Ai Weiwei, Julio Le Parc, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes and the New York-based Jamaican artist Nari Ward. Works donated by Pérez, largely by Latin American artists, are also on display... Read the interview in full here

In 1996, Elon Musk – and we realise how quaint this now sounds – did his first million dollar deal. The software company he started in 1995 with $28,000 of his father’s money picked up a $3 million investment and his remarkable career, from software to space via PayPal and sustainable propulsion, was off.

Along the way he has destroyed decades of received wisdom and borrowed business practices and, despite all that, his smartest rivals still think the world of him. As CCO of Aston Martin, Marek Reichman knows a thing or two about building beautiful, cutting-edge cars. It’s thanks to Musk, he says, ‘that our industry is now engaged in a radical rethink of how we create and deliver transportation’... Read the interview in full here

Illustration: Eoin Ryan

Rare now is the fashion brand that doesn’t do art in some way, does not sponsor, show, collaborate or co-mingle with artists and galleries. It can look like a crushing embrace. But one designer has been doing it for longer and with more sophistication and commitment than any other.

Miuccia Prada, who trained as a mime artist before joining the family operation, established the Fondazione Prada in 1993 and began collecting art; seriously and with serious intent. The Rem Koolhaas-designed New York Prada store, or Epicenter, which opened in 2001, was more gallery and performance space than glittering showcase for product. But Prada has been careful to compartmentalise the fashion brand and the Fondazione. It has its permanent curators, commissions as well as collects, and puts on museum-standard shows.

Last year, the Fondazione Prada campus, also designed by OMA, opened in Milan; twice the size of Renzo Piano’s new Whitney in New York and twice the fun. It has redefined what a private gallery can and should be. It’s an engaging new cultural hub for a city known more for commercial thrust and will be Prada’s real legacy... Read the interview in full here

Modesty almost forbids, but only almost. In fact, space doesn’t allow a complete list of our many advances and upshifts, our constant refinements and occasional reinventions over the last 20 years. Here’s just a few to be going on with: establishing the Handmade exhibition as the showcase of contemporary craft and design; creating the perfect pocket-sized travel guide; civilising e-commerce with the W* Store; curating a long-running series of artist-designed covers and back-page artist’s recipes; the encouragement and advancement of wave after wave of young designers and architects; and, of course, smuggling more dubious double entendres onto our covers than any magazine ever.

Ai Weiwei on art, architecture, politics and the internet...

Working with Ai Weiwei was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. Partly because we had barely a year to make a major exhibition at the Royal Academy, but mainly because he’s a profound, uncompromising and heroic individual whose humanity and humour are never far away.

Outside his studio in Caochangdi – a kind of artists’ village in Beijing – the street is lined with surveillance cameras, each one festooned with a red Chinese lantern by Weiwei, the most gentle of subversions. A bike was chained to the lamppost outside the main door – and it had a fresh bunch of flowers in its basket every day until he got his passport back. For most of the time we were working together, it seemed unlikely he would be able to come to London. I went to Beijing five times over the year and every trip I’d ask whether there was any change in attitude from the Chinese authorities. ‘I always remain optimistic, but every time I think the police might return my passport I am disappointed. Perhaps I am naive,’ he told me.

I remembered his exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale, soon after his release from prison, where his mother had come instead. Would she, I wondered, be able to come to London if he were unable to travel. ‘She’s too frail now,’ he said. ‘How about your son?’ I asked. ‘I know he’s only six, but maybe he would like to come.’ ‘My son hates London,’ he told me, rather devastatingly. ‘When I was imprisoned I didn’t want him to know details, so he was told Daddy is in London.’

At the end of July 2015, Weiwei got his passport and was able to come to London – although some jobsworth in the British Embassy in Beijing nearly threw a spanner in the works by refusing him a full visa on the basis that he’d not declared a criminal conviction. (He was never charged, let alone convicted, but that’s another story.) His son, Ai Lao, came too. The usually controlled Weiwei told me how emotional it was seeing his first exhibition in the flesh for more than five years. I asked Ai Lao what he thought of the show. He thought for some time and then said, ‘There is nothing wrong with this exhibition.’ His father told me that was the highest praise his son ever gave. ‘Is there anything wrong with London?’ I asked – the boy shook his head. The city was redeemed.

The night before the exhibition opening, we were walking through the RA courtyard on the way to Chinatown for dinner. In the twilight, we saw a young couple sitting in the black marble armchair Weiwei had installed together with nine remarkable ancient composite trees. As we got close, I realised they were in a deep embrace. Weiwei took out his camera and photographed them. The man looked up and I thought he was about to give us a volley of abuse. ‘This is the artist,’ I said, rather randomly. His face lit up. ‘I love your work,’ he exclaimed. ‘I love yours,’ said Weiwei. ‘Carry on!’ Which they duly did.

Since your return to China from the US, how has your artistic practice changed? In the US, I was interested in art related to ideas and concepts, and surrealism and Dada, which were the movements most related to our human thinking. After I returned to China, it was a completely different situation. China was still under severe censorship. Communist ideology is against freedom of expression. I began to organise underground books and curate exhibitions to promote the local culture. From 1993 to 2003, I basically could not show anything, except to be involved in the underground. In 2004, I had the first opportunity to exhibit in Switzerland and that restarted my so-called career as an artist. Your architecture has attracted high-profile fans like Lord Foster. Have you ever viewed yourself as an architect? What is architecture’s relationship to the practice of your art? I am an architect by nature. Just as I am a political activist by nature, or an artist by nature. To build is a natural human act. I cannot distinguish much between architecture and art. One might be more practical while the other is more about aesthetic or moral arguments, but they are the same. What role does politics play in your work? Our philosophy of how we look at the world is deeply related to our aesthetics. Sometimes, in certain political conditions, one character can become more pronounced than the others. However, they are all related. Even the most political statement requires a form or language to be acceptable, or expressed clearly. That is why the internet is so important. It plays a big role in my work because it gives an individual like myself a clear identity and way of communication. Ai Weiwei is one of our 20 Game-Changers. Read about the other 19 here As originally featured in the October 2016 issue of Wallpaper (W*211)

Ai Weiwei on art, architecture, politics and the internet...

Since your return to China from the US, how has your artistic practice changed? In the US, I was interested in art related to ideas and concepts, and surrealism and Dada, which were the movements most related to our human thinking. After I returned to China, it was a completely different situation. China was still under severe censorship. Communist ideology is against freedom of expression. I began to organise underground books and curate exhibitions to promote the local culture. From 1993 to 2003, I basically could not show anything, except to be involved in the underground. In 2004, I had the first opportunity to exhibit in Switzerland and that restarted my so-called career as an artist. Your architecture has attracted high-profile fans like Lord Foster. Have you ever viewed yourself as an architect? What is architecture’s relationship to the practice of your art? I am an architect by nature. Just as I am a political activist by nature, or an artist by nature. To build is a natural human act. I cannot distinguish much between architecture and art. One might be more practical while the other is more about aesthetic or moral arguments, but they are the same. What role does politics play in your work? Our philosophy of how we look at the world is deeply related to our aesthetics. Sometimes, in certain political conditions, one character can become more pronounced than the others. However, they are all related. Even the most political statement requires a form or language to be acceptable, or expressed clearly. That is why the internet is so important. It plays a big role in my work because it gives an individual like myself a clear identity and way of communication. Ai Weiwei is one of our 20 Game-Changers. Read about the other 19 here As originally featured in the October 2016 issue of Wallpaper (W*211)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Ai Weiwei’s website

’Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison’ boasts a starry creative line-up, with pieces responding to the work of Oscar Wilde tucked away in claustrophobic cells

The charitable arts organisation Artangel is nothing if not ambitious: locations for its site-specific installations have included a Peckham council flat, a shop on Oxford Street and most recently the Houses of Parliament. Now, for Reading’s 2016 Year of Culture, it has put together a first group exhibition – and it’s at a decommissioned Victorian jail in a London commuter belt town, best known for its former inmate Oscar Wilde.

'Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison' boasts a starry line-up, with pieces tucked away in dozens of claustrophobic cells. There is new work by Steve McQueen, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nan Goldin and Marlene Dumas, writing by Ai Weiwei, and a series of readings from Wilde’s De Profundis by talents including Ralph Fiennes and Patti Smith.

The art largely takes Wilde’s texts written in the former Reading Gaol as a starting point, transforming his suffering into something expansive and elemental. Roni Horn and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ meditations on water are exhibited together and make for a compelling partnership, while Vija Celmins’ absorbing drawings of night skies are broad and reflective.

The atmosphere overall is subdued, although some artists more than others have paid attention to the eerie environment of the Panopticon-inspired prison, which held prisoners as recently as 2013. In the chapel, there is a totemic sculpture by French artist Jean-Michel Pancin that incorporates the original door from Wilde’s cell. Light floods in from the large windows on either side, and away from the oppressive corridors of the prison there is a hushed calm.

By giving its contributors free rein, Artangel has created an unexpectedly moving exhibition; a deeply personal love letter from an eclectic group of artists for whom Wilde’s hidden emotional life still resonates.

The exhibition features new work by Steve McQueen, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nan Goldin and Marlene Dumas, writing by Ai Weiwei, and a series of readings

The art largely takes Wilde’s texts written in the former Reading Gaol as a starting point, transforming his suffering into something positive

The overall atmosphere is subdued, although some artists have paid more attention to the eerie environment of the Panopticon-inspired prison than others.

By giving its contributors free rein, Artangel has created an unexpectedly moving exhibition.

The display communicates a deeply personal love letter from an eclectic group of artists for whom Wilde’s hidden emotional life still resonates.

INFORMATION

’Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison’ is on view until 30 October. For more information, visit the Artangel website

Photography: Marcus J Leith & James Lingwood. Courtesy Artangel

ADDRESS

HM Prison Reading
Forbury Road
Reading, RG1 3HY

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For Ai Weiwei, Instagram has been a friend and an enemy. The pros are that the platform has multiplied his international fame tenfold, turning him into one of the app's biggest stars and also a defacto real time newswire, documenting the Syrian refugee crisis in Lesbos, the Syrian border and Beirut.

The negatives are people’s skepticism over his presence, wary of an ethical grey area that has seen his photos of the crisis become a prestigious body of work. A self-titled new exhibition at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens – on view until 30 October – tries to answer these questions.

‘We have to protect humanity. Through my art I’m trying to give a voice to people who might never be heard,’ Weiwei said at the exhibition opening, a showcase of photography and new sculpture in part profiling a five month-long period documenting the Syrian crisis. ‘I think it’s terrible that European governments are pushing refugees into Turkey. As an artist you use your emotions to communicate information to the world.’ The five-foot tall sculpture Standing Figure (2016) articulates his ideas on the power of governmental solidarity for refugees, as well nodding to his previous work criticising governments – the sculpture’s outstretched arms a reference to his indictment of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the photo series Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995).

Weiwei admires the political and cultural models practiced by the Greeks and his life sized marble sculpture riff on the popular style of crafting human bodies at the beginning of the Cycladic era, which he fused with his love for grand statements, making his own seven-foot version. But it is Greece’s morality that the exhibition really lauds: ‘Greece showed elegance and respect to let refugees in and not to push people into the ocean; Greece’s decisions will be remembered by history,’ Weiwei states.

INFORMATION

’Ai Weiwei at Cycladic’ is on view until 30 October. For more information, visit the Museum of Cycladic Art’s website

Photography courtesy the artist and the Museum of Cycladic Art

ADDRESS

Museum of Cycladic Art
4, Neophytou Douka str.
Athens 10674

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A new exhibition of Chinese contemporary art at ArtisTree in Hong Kong offers a unique perspective of one of the country’s most extraordinary periods of history, from the end of the Cultural Revolution until 2010.

The 80 works on show include painting, sculpture, installation and photography by 50 artists, and are largely drawn from a collection of 1,510 works that the Swiss collector Dr Uli Sigg donated to the M+ visual arts museum in 2012.

Sigg, 69, first visited China in 1979 as a businessman and returned between 1995 and 1999 as the Swiss ambassador to Beijing. 

‘I realised no one was collecting the works to document what was happening so I decided to collect as an institution would. It was not about personal tastes or preferences but about mirroring the art produced,’ he explains.

It is this forethought that allows M+ the unique luxury of being treated to a concentrated overview of seminal works that mirror China's rapid change.

The exhibition is arranged in a chronological order starting with early important pieces like Fusuijing Building, 1975, a painting by the artist Zhang Wei, showing the view outside the artist’s studio (where the first secret exhibition by the No Name group was held), and Ma Desheng’s early graphic print works. 

These works set the context for the more experimental period which followed, with more avant-garde pieces like Wang Guangyi’s Mao Zedong: Red Grid No 2 showing Mao behind red bars; Li Shan’s provocative Rouge-Flower; and Zeng Fanzhi’s Rainbow.

More recent highlights include Ai Weiwei’s Still Life installation of around 4,000 Stone Age axe-heads, reflecting China’s take on social history; and Beijing-based Liu Wei’s deceptively beguiling photographic piece depicting a traditional Chinese landscape using parts of his body as representations of the physical landscape, are distinct highlights. Video artist Cao Fei’s video Whose Utopia is another standout in an already stellar collection of works.

The captivating combination of works reveals a side of Chinese art with memorable clarity. ‘The collection is important because it reflects their reality and so contributes to our understanding of China today,’ says Sigg.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Taikoo Place website

ADDRESS

ArtisTree
1F Cornwall House
Taikoo Place
979 King’s Road
Quarry Bay
Hong Kong

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For Émile Zola, the emergence of department stores in the latter half of the 19th century Paris conjured up cathedrals of capitalism. For Ai Weiwei some 130 years later, Le Bon Marché has become a playground for exposing original, traditionally crafted works.

An exhibition within a retail space is a first for the fearless Chinese artist, whose show at the Royal Academy of the Arts ended just last month. Le Bon Marché approached him over a year ago with an invitation to fill the windows and the grand central atrium with creatures and multi-layered scenes, some more familiar than others. Those within the store borrow from Shan Hai Jin ('Classic of the Mountains and the Seas'), a book of myths populated with such hybrids as a turtle-fish, a fish-rooster and a serpent spirit with a human head. Outside, meanwhile, are scenes that attest to Weiwei’s own narrative: surveillance cameras, his notoriously upward-pointing middle finger, his bicycle (which, along with a bottle rack, serves as a nod to Marcel Duchamp) and the three-legged stools from his Venice Biennale installation in 2013. Whereas certain figures expose frameworks of bamboo, others are sheathed in delicate white silk. The production took place in Shandong, where artisans employed traditional kite-making techniques.

According to Le Bon Marché’s artistic director, Frédéric Bodenes, ten members from Weiwei’s team and five from the store’s began the installation on 5 January and assembled the theatrical installation, 'little by little' and mainly during the evenings. A dragon symbolising hope, reassurance and energy was completed not long after the artist arrived in Paris, his first visit since 2003.

In a short film projected across from the dragon installation, Weiwei explains how he set out to link the mythic tales at the heart of Chinese culture with his cultural impressions of Paris, in order to arrive at a contemporary, personal statement.  'What is created is about our new look of the new century,' says the artist in a conversation with Wallpaper*. 'It’s about all the possibilities of imagination.'

The show falls during the store’s 'White Sale', an annual event started by founder Aristide Boucicaut (as Bodenes tells it, the theme of white was the store’s sole request to Weiwei). To see the artist's work against the backdrop of markdowns – not to mention all the multi-brand signage – risks being both visually and conceptually jarring. But the fact that the show’s title, 'Er Xi, Air de Jeu' – meaning 'playground' in both languages – suggests how the exhibition functions more as a folly than a platform to provoke. For Weiwei, who became free to travel in July when Chinese authorities finally returned his passport, displaying his work within a store represents a creatively open-minded idea – one that he was enthusiastic to accept.

'Here, you have a society that has matureness in both the commerce and the culture. And it can be mixed with a much more sophisticated language. China is developed imbalanced-ly. It doesn’t have social critic[ism] or aesthetic discussion or philosophical thinking. If a society misses these parts, development is dangerous because it’s not balanced and doesn’t know where to go.'

Moreover, he insists there’s no incongruity in showing artistic work within a space devoted to luxury consumption – perhaps because, in this case, so many of the works exist in an interpretative, poetic realm. 'I take a readymade like Duchamp’s and make a little taste and then it becomes something else,' he says. 'I think you can use these [ideas] to your benefit.'

Information

'Er Xi, Air de Jeux' is on view until 20 February. For more information, visit Le Bon Marché's website

Photography courtesy Gabriel de la Chapelle

Address

Le Bon Marché
24 rue de Sèvres
75007 Paris

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For the past six months, Electric Objects — the company that makes the EO1, a three-in-one device that’s a high-definition screen, computer and app made specifically to display digital art — has commissioned over $50,000 of original art. The company tapped more than 50 artists from around the globe, who made over 200 pieces, and called the project Art Club.

Last week, Electronic Objects unveiled the new works at two pop-up locations in New York: the New Museum Store and a space in the heart of Soho. 'This space was an opportunity for us to share this work with the world, and give people a glimpse of what it's like to bring a dedicated digital art experience into the home,' says Jake Levine, the founder of Electronic Objects.

Open through 20 December, both locations will feature works by Bjork, Ai Weiwei, Zach Gage, YACHT, Sabrina Ratte, and more.

At the Soho location, 72 Spring Street to be exact, guests can experience WAR, an installation by game designer, programmer, educator, and conceptual artist Zach Gage. Those passing by the New Museum can also see works hanging in the window. The Spring Street space features monochrome settings with EO1s hanging on the wall, so visitors can visualize what it would look like hanging in their own home. On one screen, an ethereal Bjork sways gently, while on another a black cat files its claws. Those who stop in at the stores also have the opportunity to buy a limited edition wood EO1frame (with free shipping, even).

'Electric Objects isn't a tech device, it's meant to fade into the background, to become a part of the home,' explains Levine. 'Our Frames help match EO1 to the feeling and aesthetic of a space, which is so important.'

INFORMATION

Electric Objects is open at the New Museum and 72 Spring Street until 20 December

Since artists are often seeking to interpret quotidian life around them, it should come as no surprise that they would have been drawn to the novelty of machines right from the start of the Industrial Revolution. A new exhibition at the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, titled L’Art et la Machine, explores how the two realms overlap aesthetically and to a lesser extent, technically. From William Jackson’s ornate monocycle to Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, the Louis Lumière’s film of an approaching train to Chris Burden’s ship models spinning around an Eiffel Tower, the show reverberates with artistic renderings of production, progress, mechanics and engineering.

Displaying upwards of 170 works in soaring spaces completed by Coop Himmelb(l)au last December, it also poses a fundamental question concerning process; in simplistic terms, art is created, machines are invented. Except, of course, this distinction isn’t as crisply black and white as the Alfred Stieglitz and Germaine Krull’s photos of airplanes and apparatuses. Are vintage cameras, including one designed by Jean-Luc Godard, now considered objets d’art? Is Jean Tinguely’s La Cloche from 1967 a machine because its electric motor forces a bell to sound?

The idea for the exhibition dates back to 2001 when conservationist Claudine Cartier and well-known culture journalist Emmanuel de Roux published a book on industrial patrimony in France. After De Roux passed away in 2008, Henri-Claude Cousseau (former director of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris) stepped in to co-curate the show, which largely consists of loans from institutions across Europe.

A series of genre paintings by mostly unknown nineteenth century artists depict factory workers toiling by the glow of furnaces and shouldering oversized steel parts. Arguably, the canvases serve a documentary purpose more than an aesthetic one. The next few galleries show how Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and Frantisek Kupka applied abstraction to capture speed. Elsewhere, César’s compressed Alfa Romeo and Arman’s fanned column of Renault R16 side panels show how parts meant for motion have been rendered as static, architectural sculptures. Perhaps inspired by the selection of films on view (Metropolis, Modern Times, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, the Matrix), the exhibition excels in theatrical shadow play and dynamic scenography so that the darkened spaces have the ambience of a film noir set.

The final section of the show shifts gears, as contemporary art from Nam June Paik, Claude Lévêque, Bertrand Lavier and Ai Weiwei use machines as their media. Given that the works appear disassembled, crumpled, caged-in or repurposed, the statement turns from valorisation to a commentary on how we live with machines today. And now that our era has transitioned into all things digital, the pièce de résistance, Tinguely’s ambitiously oddball Méta-Maxi (1986) offers a somewhat bric-a-brac throwback to old-school assembly. On loan from the Daimler Art Collection in Stuttgart, the hulking, work of art was pieced together from factory offcuts, reclaimed debris and an assortment of neglected toys. Every few minutes, visitors can watch it rev up so that the various parts produce an amusing racket of clunks and clangour.

INFORMATION

’L’Art et la Machine’ is on view till 24 January 2016. For more information, visit the website

After three years of trekking back and forth to Ai Weiwei’s studio in Beijing, armed with expensive bottles of Italian red wine, gallerist Elisabetta Cipriani finally persuaded the artist to work with her. It was not easy; at first he wasn’t keen, dealing as he does with weightier themes, but Cipriani’s charm, and her roster of artist collaborators, among them Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Giorgio Vigna, persuaded him.

Last week, the results of the pair’s efforts went on show at the Mayfair gallery that Cipriani founded six years ago. ‘Rebar in Gold’ consists of two 24 carat gold strips, each 20cm and 60 cm long that are soft enough to be moulded into a bracelet by the wearer. (With his bear-like grip, Weiwei manipulated Cipriani‘s own piece with ease, though less statuesque wearers may struggle).

Engraved with indents and markings, each gold strip is designed to reference the twisted steel rods that appear in his seminal work, Straight, currently on show at the Royal Academy. In it, Weiwei places 200 tonnes of contorted steel rebar, salvaged from the scene of the Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan province in 2008, on the floor. The work commemorates the 70,000 people who perished largely due to the poor construction techniques in the region.

Since 2009, Cipriani, a former curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, has worked with 17 artists to make limited edition jewellery pieces. ‘I am thankful to Ai for choosing Straight as the basis of the project. Although simple in appearance, the bracelets have a strong and meaningful concept, which to me is what an artist’s 'jewel' should have,’ says Cipriani.

Weiwei took charge of everything from sourcing the gold, right down to the design of the elegant wooden and glass cabinets in which the pieces are displayed. ‘He put a lot of energy into this project,’ says Cipriani, ‘and although I did approach him, ultimately, I believe, he chose me.’

INFORMATION
For more information on Straight, visit the Royal Academy website, and to find out about Rebar in Gold, which will be on show until 16 January 2016, visit Elisabetta Cipriani’s website

ADDRESS

Elisabetta Cipriani
23 Heddon Street
W1B 4BQ
London

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International collection points are springing up the world over for Ai Weiwei, after the Danish toy giant Lego refused a bulk order from him.

Parked cars in noteworthy locations – from Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria to the Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam – aim to gather as many of the iconic brick toys as possible for the artist.

Lego’s refusal may have come as a surprise, especially as they have previously provided materials for other artists including Olafur Eliasson earlier this year, but the toy manufacturer has said it has a long-standing policy not to provide its bricks for works making political statements.

The collection points offer the wider community a key role in the internationally acclaimed artist's creative process. Arguably, they make the pieces even more meaningful, too.

The National Gallery of Victoria is hosting a major new exhibition by Ai Weiwei and Andy Warhol in December, focusing on Australian activists, advocates and champions of human rights and freedom of expression.

Ai Weiweii has famously used Lego to create portraits of dissidents such as Nelson Mandela and Edward Snowden and intriguingly posted on Instagram on Monday, ‘This is the first phase of the coming projects.’ We await the results.

Information

'Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei' will be on display at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, from 11 December, 2015 - 24 April, 2016 

The Helsinki Art Museum, housed in the 1930s Tennispalatsi, or Tennis Palace, has reopened after a major renovation with a blockbuster show from Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. The 14-month renovation by local architects Arkkitehdit NRT, including a move into the building’s 12-metre high dome, has doubled exhibition and public space to 3,000 sq m. And it is these dome galleries that are playing host to ‘Ai Weiwei @ Helsinki’, a show which stretches through the artist’s early works from the 1980s to two new large scale pieces: White House, a traditional timber Qing Dynasty house, shipped wholesale to Helsinki; and Garbage Container, a large elegant wardrobe of sorts which is really an elegy for five homeless boys from Guizhou Province who died of carbon monoxide poisoning after lighting a fire in a bin to stay warm. Many of the works are in wood, a nod perhaps to Finland’s tradition of fine woodworking.

It’s been a good summer for Ai Weiwei with rave reviews and long queues for his show at the Royal Academy show in London. The Helsinki show is another triumph for the newly mobile artist.

HAM, as it is known, has a permanent collection of over 9,000 works of Finnish art, almost half of them dotted around local schools, libraries, hospitals and parks. The remodeled museum also includes a new space dedicated to emerging Finish artists. HAM’s renovation is part of a wider cultural push in central Helskinki. A new timber-framed Central Library, designed by ALA Architects, is set to open in 2018; as is an entirely underground second branch of the Amos Andersen Art Museum which will be dedicated to experimental and technology-based works.

More controversial is the proposed Helsinki outpost for the Guggenheim. Finalised designs for Europe’s third Guggenmheim, by Paris-based Moreau Kusunoki, were revealed this summer. The competition-winning design, a series of charred timber pavilions, has been well-received but there have been reservations about the cost of the new museum, to be covered by the Finnish Government if the plans are approved. The Helsinki City Board will decide whether to give the development the go-ahead later this year.

INFORMATION
Ai Weiwei @ Helsinki will run until 2 February, 2016; www.hamhelsinki.fi

ADDRESS

Eteläinen Rautatiekatu 8 
00100 Helsinki

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The five years since Ai Weiwei unveiled his installation of porcelain Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern have been truly momentous and troubling times for the Chinese artist. Not only was that the last time he had a passport and was free to travel to one of his own shows (he has had maybe 100 in the intervening period), but his world-famous name has barely been whispered in his own country since. Yet his homeland provides much of the impetus and thematic content for a major Royal Academy exhibition, which begins with a forest of petrified tree parts from the mountainous south and a giant extruded map of China’s capacious borders, before leading visitors through the ruins of an ancient temple and past the remains of schools flattened by the devastating earthquake of 2008.

It is arguably this latter work, entitled Straight (2008–12) – a monumental wave of steel bars salvaged from the gnarled wreckages of the Sichuan earthquake, painstakingly hammered back to their original state by hand – which landed Ai Weiwei in an unmarked prison for 81 days of interrogation. Much of the accompanying citizen’s investigation that uncovered the names of 5,000 children who died because their schools were inadequately built is also on display here; again, as much a provocation as a work of art. Evidence of his secret incarceration is also on show in the dioramas of S.A.C.R.E.D (2012) – six boxes containing scenes describing the conditions he was put under (the title standing for 'Supper, Accusers, Cleansing, Ritual, Entropy and Doubt').

What elevates this show beyond the political, emotional or merely personal, however, is the artist’s meditations on normal life given a transformative, material twist – a child’s buggy stranded in a sea of marble grass, a sex toy carved from priceless jade, or a simple bicycle, conjoined with others to form a glamorous chandelier. Ai Weiwei is nothing if not contradictory: part destructive force – when smashing a Han dynasty pot, for example – and part keeper of traditional Chinese crafts and antiques, through his modified and mutated Ming furniture. Long may the dissent continue.

INFORMATION

’Ai Weiwei’ is on view until 13 December

Photography courtesy of the artist

ADDRESS

Royal Academy
Burlington House
Piccadilly
London W1J 0BD

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London's Serpentine Galleries and American textile house, Maharam's collaboration: A collection of 13 patterned wallpapers by seven artists and architects. Frames, from left, Circa 1907 American Arts & Crafts painting frame, by Carrig-Rohane Boston Makers; 18th-century French Louis XVI frame; custom-made replica of a 1920s-30s American Modernist frame; 19th-century french shadowbox frame, all from Gill & Lagodich Gallery, New York  Producer: Michael Reynolds

Putting a John Baldessari or a Rosemarie Trockel on your wall just got a whole lot easier, thanks to a collaboration between London's Serpentine Galleries and the American textile house, Maharam. The Serpentine's latest stab at making art accessible to all is an inspiring collection of wallpapers. Made up of 13 patterns, mainly produced specifically for the project, by seven artists and architects, the inaugural collection brings the long tradition of artists creating wallpapers bang up to date.

Under the fine curatorial eye of Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-directors of the Serpentine Galleries, the Maharam Serpentine Galleries wallpaper collection includes previously unseen work from artists such as John Baldessari, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Rosemarie Trockel, Lawrence Weiner and Ai Weiwei, as well as architects Toyo Ito and SANAA, as featured in our June 2015 issue (W*195).

'Wallpaper is something many artists and architects have been interested in,' explains Obrist, who visited artists such as Beatriz González in Bogota and Etel Adnan in Beirut, during his early research of the idea.

'We found it interesting that this partnership with Maharam could be an exhibition of wallpapers that might be seen in houses all over the world and would actually lead to a dissemination.' 'It is possible for all of us to commission architects, designers and indeed artists, to do something specifically for us,' Peyton-Jones says. 'However, having wallpaper that you can buy by the roll, to cover a wall, a room, or a [whole] house or apartment, means that you can be your own curator in your own home.'

The collection's vibrant patterns range from the abstract to the photorealistic, and are all realised using the fine-art grade, digital printing techniques that Maharam has finessed since launching its Maharam Digital Projects arm in 2009. Each artist's design is printed with UV-resistant inks onto a latex- reinforced substrate. The end results possess all the durability of traditional wallpaper.

Apart from John Baldessari's four designs, which originally appeared in a 1998 exhibition in Zurich, each pattern is freshly minted. From Marc Camille Chaimowicz's illustrative 'Pavilion' design, which depicts the Serpentine building in its Kensington surroundings, to Ai Weiwei's self-referential 'Golden Age' and Rosemarie Trockel's restrained shapes, the works are not just familiar favourites on a roll.

'The patterns were created in dialogue with the artists, and on the basis of past work that had been underexposed,' comments Michael Maharam, the wallpaper company's CEO, who helped set the course of the Serpentine Galleries' venture. While the choice to include designs from SANAA and Toyo Ito might seem an unusual turn, the architects' involvement highlights the increasing cross-pollination between art, design and architecture, which the Serpentine Galleries has long pioneered.

Everyone involved in the collection was given creative carte blanche. Maharam provided only technical guidance to ensure a distinguishable pattern was created. Dung Ngo, the brand's editorial director, explains, 'Because artists' works are generally unique as a composition, they can struggle with the idea of a repeatable pattern. The best way [of working] has often been for us to create a repeat with the art they give us, so they can see what it looks like on a wall. Once they see it, it is much easier to make adjustments.'

Briefly showcased at a Libby Sellers - curated show at La Rinascente, during April's Salone del Mobile in Milan, the collection will debut officially at Frieze New York this month.'We see it as an evolving exhibition,' says Obrist, 'like the Serpentine Pavilions, which have been going for 15 years. We hope there will be 200 years of wallpaper.'

As featured in the June 2015 (W*195) issue of Wallpaper*

Inflatable Swiss chalets, huge easter eggs and bare-breasted women beating resin blocks in a public park. It's the first week of December, and once again in Miami, the art fair has come to town, with this year activities neatly bookended in the north of the city by a show at MOCA of Tracey Emin's neon works - 67 created over 20 years - called Angel Without You and in the south by a retrospective exhibition of Ai Weiwei's work at the newly opened, Herzog & de Meuron-designed Pérez Art Museum.

Emin's archive of chaotically scrawled and spelt slogans - in a lofty blacked-out space - read like illuminated scribblings on a toilet wall. From inanities such as 'Is Legal Sex Anal?' and 'Is Anal Sex Legal?', to moments of beauty ('Love happens - like lightning') and self-knowledge ('I know, I know, I know' - crossed out three times), it's Emin in her best light.

Weiwei's politics often focus on the billions of Chinese who labour thanklessly in the creation of their country. At PAMM an enormous sculpture made of shiny metal bicycle wheels (a nod to both Duchamp and the only transport available to many working Chinese) has the feel of a war memorial for workers, recognising all those subjugated by the system.

Between these two poles, the business of the fair has gone along briskly, dealers having upped their game with some fighting work. (Miami is no longer the funsome little sister of June's Art Basel but a more serious player in its own right, particularly with its geographical attraction for the Latin American market.)

Gagosian's big gun is the Jeff Koons showstopper 'Baroque Egg with Bow', in scintillating turquoise and hot pink (1994-2008), a massive bundle of symbolism (from new birth to a stealthy restraint, suggested by the big bravura ribbon). At Sadie Coles, Sarah Lucas's 'Tit' chair (2012) - entirely 'upholstered' in stuffed stockings that pop up like perky breasts - is a ribald piece of feminism, poking particularly apposite fun at a Miami audience, where enhancements come as standard. And at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, Martin Creed has constructed an elegant pyramid of bog-standard toilet rolls. It isn't ironic - more an act of transformation of this prerequisite of contemporary life into a perfect architectural component.

Other ways to get noticed include the booth of Neugerriemschneider, which Jorge Pardo has turned into a lush domestic space, lined with cheap fabrics more usually used to make Mexican pinafores (Pardo, who is Cuban, now lives in Merida). Everything is for sale, while other artists' work is encased in the shelving system he has created around the outside of the stand. And at Marianne Boesky, Roxie Paine's massive moving neon piece of a man being knocked down and getting back up could hardly be missed. 'I think it's how artists feel everyday,' says Boesky.

Beyond the Convention Centre, projects take on a more expansive form. LA artist Ry Rocklen has created an art bar, sponsored by Absolut, turning a patch of ground by the W Hotel into a basketball court, filled with chess and ping pong tables created from trophies and trophy parts, a comment, perhaps on the winners and losers that an overly competitive art market now creates.
 
Another large-scale installation came in the inflatable form of a Swiss-style chalet. Perched over the water at the Miami Marina Stadium, its polyurethane skin gently heating in the Florida sun, it is the creation of French artist duo Kolkoz for Swiss watch company Audemar Piguet. 'We love clichés and we love Pop,' say the pair. Indeed.

With its pristine beaches and Art Deco buildings, Miami's South Beach district has long been the tropical city's calling card. But while South Beach represents Miami's glamorous past and present, the city's downtown district could very well represent its future. December (always a busy time in Miami) will see the opening of the Pérez Art Museum Miami - a stunningly modern construction by Herzog & de Meuron, matched by an exciting collection and art programme to boot.

Traditionally considered the financial centre of the city and the Latin American region, downtown Miami has seen a surge in cultural activity. The Pérez Art Museum Miami is the first part of the development of a multifaceted 'cultural corridor' known as Museum Park, which will also include the transplanting of the city's Science Museum into a building designed by Grimshaw Architects, a sprawling bayside public park and a landscaped plaza conceived by Field Operations.

Instead of the traditional museum format, Herzog & de Meuron has designed a dynamic interweaving layout that allows for a fluid transition between the art museum's permanent collection and special exhibitions. The cast concrete building, which will also house a big-name restaurant and cafe, references the raised houses of Stiltsville, an architectural type unique to the Floridian vernacular. With their raised, wraparound terraces and broad overhanging canopies, the houses are conceived to withstand hurricanes and floods, while providing ample shade and ventilation.

Given its waterside location, the same considerations applied to the new museum building, which will boast a sprawling wood plank canopy to offer shelter for visitors from the elements. Its first gallery floor is 20ft above sea level, well over the 18ft flood mark, to ensure that art pieces are protected. At ground level, Herzog & de Meuron has designed a dynamic carpark, similar to their popular structure on 1111 Lincoln Road in South Beach, with gaps between the concrete floors of levels above to allow light to filter through.

To top it all off, the museum will also incorporate a series of hanging vertical gardens made from local plants and vegetation, designed by Patrick Blanc. While these will drop down from the higher levels, greenery will also be planted in the ground floor carpark and be allowed to grow through the gaps above for an integrated effect.

Despite its relatively young collection, the new PAMM museum is striding out with a point of view that will appeal to Miami's multicultural population. For its inauguration, the museum will stage an exhibition of the work of Ai Wei Wei, including a new site-specific installation created for the space. Its current exhibition (the swansong at its current premises) presents a vivid cross-section of paintings and sculpture from Latin America - a direction it will continue to push in at its new home.

The Serpentine Gallery's annual Pavilion is a staple of the capital's summer architecture calendar and it rarely disappoints. Combining space for events, a shelter from the summer sun, an oasis of relaxation and thought-provoking design, it has over the years taken the shape of a helium balloon, a super-bright red steel structure and a mysterious hidden garden. It is also always designed by an exceptional contemporary architect, one that has yet to complete their first built work in London, making this temporary structure a much-anticipated architectural happening.  

In many respects this year's commission is special. To start with, the people behind it have actually already had a strong presence in London; albeit not as a team. Swiss practice Herzog & de Meuron are the architects of much-celebrated projects such as the Tate Modern conversion (and now, its addition), while their partner, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, saw his hotly-discussed Sunflower Seeds show open at the Tate's Turbine Hall in 2010.

Herzog & de Meuron and Weiwei have worked together to great acclaim before on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games but this is their first collaborative UK venture. And it seems fitting that their new project should open just in time for the 2012 Games in London.

'Every year, architects impatiently and jealously wait for the announcement of the Pavilion,' said Jacques Herzog at the opening. 'Working with Ai Weiwei again makes it even more intriguing'. Meanwhile, Weiwei made his presence felt at the launch with a video statement. 'As an artist, I am always very interested to put art, design, architecture and social change together to make new possibilities,' he said.

Given the team's combined reputation for innovation and creativity, it is no surprise that they flipped the pavilion concept on its head. Instead of creating a fully-fledged new structure, the team's design puts the focus on the previous pavilions, in a near-archaeological fashion.

In a quest to 'uncover' the former pavilions' foundations, the ground was dug up to form a geography of patterns, low walls and steps that the visitors can explore - and sit on. The whole surface is covered in cork, enhancing the space's acoustics, as well as giving a tactile quality (and distinct aroma) to the interior. Above the excavation are 12 columns (one representing each pavilion, including the 2012 one) that support a large floating platform roof. It hovers 1.4m above ground and holds a shallow pool of rainwater.

Taking the visitor below ground level and within the intriguingly sculptural landscape of the excavation, Herzog & de Meuron and Weiwei's design acts as an homage to the Serpentine's whole Pavilion program, inviting the crowds to discover the hidden footprints of the new structure's predecessors.  

ADDRESS

Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
London W2 3XA

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The Danish Pavilion: 'Wellfairytale' by Big architects
The Danish have decided to move their Little Mermaid statue, along with a supertanker full of water from the harbour, to Shanghai. 'It is more efficient to move the Little Mermaid to China than to move 1.3b Chinese to Copenhagen,' remarked BIG architects and the 2+1 Ideas Agency. The statue will sit at the base of a swirling velodrome, where 1,500 Danish bicycles will carry visitors through the exhibits. Meanwhile, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei will design a temporary sculpture to fill the space left by the mermaid.

For this year's Shanghai Expo, countries around the globe have been locked in battle to produce the most show-stopping pavilion and secure the attention of all-important Chinese businesses.

In our May issue (W*134), we showed Thomas Heatherwick's playful and subversive design for brand Britain, dubbed 'The Hairy Cube', and discovered the architect's thinking behind its conception. But now it's time to give other nations a chance. Here, we show some of the most arresting pavilions for the forthcoming Expo, whose theme this year is: 'Better City, Better Life.

The Dutch Pavilion: 'Happy Street’ by John Kormeling

 'I love the fact that one country has turned their Expo site into a fairground,' said one rival Expo pavilion director about the Dutch effort. The upbeat pavilion is a Dutch street that has been looped into a figure of eight (a lucky number in China) and raised into the sky. Each of the 26 houses along the curving street is dedicated to a different topic, from energy conservation to the way the Dutch have mastered the use of space. At the end of the loop sits a giant yellow tulip-shaped crown, which, fittingly, is the VIP room.

The Chinese Pavilion: 'Oriental Crown' by He Jingtang 

The Chinese pavilion is the biggest, tallest and most expensive building on the Expo site. Built from interlaced red beams locked together with traditional Chinese dougong brackets, the inverted ziggurat is visible from miles around. But then, having spent almost £40bn on the Expo (roughly twice the budget of the Beijing Olympics), the Chinese were determined to make an impressive pavilion. Visitors will get a 40-minute tour that will include a trip in a cable car. A vision of China's future low-carbon cities is also promised.

The Japanese Pavilion: 'Purple Silkworm' by Yutaka Hikosaka

 Also known as Purple Silkworm Island, this is the biggest and most expensive pavilion that Japan has built for a World Expo. The cocoon-shaped pavilion is made from the world's first 'pillow membrane', built from amorphous solar cells. Collected rainwater will be sprayed over the membrane to keep it cool as it powers the displays. Once inside, visitors can tread on electricity-generating floorboards, test-drive Toyota's one-person transport pod, and listen to violin-playing robots. Canon is also set to unveil its new 3D camera.

The Macau Pavilion: 'Rabbit Lantern' by Carlos Marreiros 

No, it's not a bunny girl from one of Macau's swankiest casinos, but a giant silver rabbit lantern, the kind Macau-born architect Carlos Marreiros remembers playing with as a child. The mega-structure is a glass case lit by colour-shifting LED lights powered by solar panels, while its head and tail are detachable balloons. Marreiros says it can be recycled when its six months are up. The 19.99m-tall rabbit marks the year (1999) when the former Portuguese colony was handed back to China. Visitors will find it sitting just a bunny hop away from the Chinese pavilion.

The Mascot: 'Haibao' by Wu Yongjian 

You can barely walk a block in Shanghai without coming across the smiley, quiff-haired blue Expo mascot, Haibao. He pops up in topiary form, in wicker, in plastic and on dominos. His creator, Wu Yongjian, spent over a month working on the waving mascot, which was picked from almost 27,000 entries. 'Haibao is inspired by Chinese calligraphy and represents the cultural uniqueness of Shanghai,' says Wu. The mascot, which looks like the Chinese character for 'people', has already learned to talk with a clipped British accent for the Expo's website.

It was back in our June Made in China issue that we first got in with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. As well as visiting his studio, we worked with this prolific creator, best known for his work with Herzog and de Meuron on the Beijing National Stadium or 'Bird's Nest', on our limited edition June cover.

Weiwei’s latest international outing comes in the form of a one man retrospective in Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. Entitled, According to What?, the exhibition features 26 works produced between 1990 and now.

See some Ai Weiwei's work on show at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo

Moving back to China in 1993 after 12 years in the US, Weiwei’s work finds influence in everything from Dada to Postmodernism and Pop Art (the name of the show is taken from a Jasper Johns painting).

With a strong emphasis on big ideas and careful metaphor the work on show includes a giant cube constructed from compressed Chinese tea, a porcelain bowl filled with fresh water pearls, a three-legged table and a map of China made from wood taken from the dismantled Qing Dynasty temples.

Subtle, ironic and a lot less introspective than much other Chinese art of Weiwei’s generation, According to What? is an elegant expression of Weiwei’s off-kilter take on the world.

ADDRESS

53F Roppongi Hills Mori Tower
6-10-1 Roppongi
Minato-ku
Tokyo
Japan 106-6150

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