The floor is entirely covered with a deep layer of what appear to be gray pebbles. It is like a bleak beach, and a toddler, getting into the spirit of it, has shed her shoes and is having a sit-down in her stockinged feet. Adults are not so comfortable: as if caught out by a freak snowstorm in the wrong shoes, several are picking a distinctly wobbly way over the crunchy, uneven surface, suddenly looking out of place in autumnal London clothes.
This is the latest installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London — a series of wow-factor installations that have, over the past decade, included Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth, a deep fissure running through the concrete floor of the building, and Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, which filled the space with mist and mirrors.
There is more to Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s (艾未未) installation than meets the eye, however. Bend and pick up one of the “pebbles” and you can see that it resembles a sunflower seed encased in its striped husk. In fact, each one — and there are 100 million of them, covering an area of 1,000m2 — is handmade from porcelain and has been individually painted by hand.
Photo: EPA
Ai — a bearded, impassive, black-clad figure, who snapped the photographers surrounding him at today’s press view almost as busily as they did him, and posted the results on Twitter — had the “seeds” made in the southern Chinese city of Jingdezhen.
“Historically, the town’s only activity has been making porcelain ware for over 1,000 years. The super-high-quality skill for generations has been making imperial porcelain ware,” he said. “In modern days, however, it has become very commercialized.”
Harnessing traditional craft skills, each seed was molded, fired, and painted with three or four individual brush strokes, often by women taking the objects home to work on them. A total of 1,600 people were involved in the process. “Even taxi drivers were talking about it,” he said.
“I tried to explain to [the artisans] what we wanted them for, but they found it very difficult to understand,” said Ai. “Everything they usually make is practical, and the painters are used to creating classically beautiful flowers using a high degree of skill.”
He said that the workers had been paid a living wage — in fact slightly more than customary — to work on the project. “Now they are asking when we can start again,” he said. “I shall have to think of a new project.”
Sunflower seeds, he said, had a particular significance in recent Chinese culture and history. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong
(毛澤東) was often likened to the sun and the people to sunflowers, gazing adoringly at his face. But sunflowers were also a humble but valued source of food in straitened times, a snack to be consumed with friends.
Ai also likened the artwork to Twitter — a vast sea of ideas and communication contributed by individual people. Ai now uses Twitter regularly after the blogs he kept were in turn censored by the Chinese authorities. One of his online projects has been to amass the names of those killed in the Sichuan earthquakes of 2008.
What if the temptation to put one of these lovingly made objects in your pocket becomes too great? Smiling, he said: “They might also want to eat one, and that would be a safety issue for the museum.” He added: “If I was in the audience I would definitely want to take a seed. But for the museum, it is a total work, and taking a seed would affect the work. Institutions have their own policies. But I know I would want to take a seed.”
A spokeswoman for the museum confirmed that they would be “encouraging people not to” depart with a souvenir. After the installation at Tate Modern is closed (it is on show until 2 May) the seeds, which weigh 136 tonnes, will be shipped back to Ai’s studio in Beijing, where he will think about using them for another project.
Did he make any of the 100 million sunflower seeds himself? “I made three or four,” he said. “But none of them was any good.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby