Art, like life, is sometimes ironic. “Ai Wei Wei Absent”, the title of the exhibition by the very controversial artist held at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), was actually decided a long time ago.
The museum and the artist have been preparing this event since 2009 but, ironically, the opening happened just a few months after Ai Wei Wei was released from his 81 days of imprisonment in Mainland China. And guess what: Ai really was absent from the exhibition opening in Taiwan.
These 21 sets of artwork by the artist, spanning a period from 1983 to the present, are the first large-scale solo exhibition by Ai Wei Wei to be held anywhere in the ethnic Chinese world. The exhibition occupies the whole of the museum’s ground floor and visitors have to walk through several rooms if they want to see the only installation created specifically for this event: “Forever Bicycles”.
At the entrance, visitors can take a look at Ai’s “Circle of Animals”, the artist’s first major work of public art. He took inspiration from the sculptures of the 12 animals of the Chinese Zodiac that, during the Qing dynasty, stood in front of the Old Summer Palace. Those original sculptures were almost destroyed by the French and the British but, many years later, a Chinese company managed to recover them from the West, paying a huge amount of money. The 12 bronze replicas created by Ai Wei Wei were shown in New York, Los Angeles and London before arriving in Taipei.
“Ai Wei Wei Absent” really works as a retrospective of the author’s life, guiding us through his early years in New York, where he became an artist during the 1980s, and back to Beijing East Village in the 1990s, when he decided to settle in China again.
Visitors can get to know more about these periods by looking at a series of over 100 photos at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Ai photographed naked people, homeless people, police officers, painters, musicians, poets and many other artists such as sculptor Wang Keping and director Chen Kaige. But, above all, Ai photographed himself.
These photos are a journey into Ai Wei Wei’s life, where we can perceive him getting older, stronger, and more and more provocative. But we cannot say this is a provocative exhibition. There is almost no political-related artwork, except for a famous photo where the 54-year-old artist holds up his middle finger to a building in Tiananmen Square. In his typically sarcastic manner, Ai named this piece, “Study of Perspective: Tiananmen Square”.
Other pieces on display at “Ai Wei Wei Absent” include a variety of art forms such as video, installations and photography, together with the use of materials like antique utensils, wood and ceramics. And, of course, lots of bicycles.
The masterpiece
Ai Wei Wei’s exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum occurred because the artist met Hsieh Hsiao-yun, at the time the museum’s director, in Tokyo, when he was preparing an exhibition for the Mori Museum. The artist visited Taipei at the end of that same year, 2009, and before he started working on his new installation he was completely familiar with the space where he would show “Forever Bicycles”.
It is not the first time that the son of the famous Chinese poet Ai Qing has used bicycles in his works. But this time Ai Wei Wei exceeded all the numbers, by including a staggering 1,200 bikes in the same installation. The visual impression is truly overwhelming.
The team who built the structure needed eight weeks to put together this 10-metre high artwork. When your eyes contemplate it, it’s almost irresistible and hypnotic. But according to the museum curators there is a deeper meaning: its labyrinthine and layered shape generates something like an illusive movement “that symbolizes the way in which the social environment in China is changing”. But what does that mean, exactly?
Ai, today one of the most well known Chinese artists in the world – if not the most well known – was arrested, released, charged with tax crimes and fined 15 million yuan – and all this happened just in 2011. So you would suppose that “Ai Wei Wei Absent” should also be about these events or at least should mention them or even highlight these facts. Well, you would be wrong.
Ai’s dissidence is completely ignored by the museum, as none of the materials available to visitors and journalists like press releases and exhibition catalogues, make any reference to the fact that he was in jail for almost three months. At the Taipei Fine Arts Museum Ai Wei Wei is not the only absentee. There is also a part of his story that is missing. And, ironically, it’s a very important one.
