I had amazing visits to China the past couple of summers. The town where I stayed and worked, Jingdezhen, is an integral part of Ai WeiWei's new art installation in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. For those of you not in the know about this most extreme of craft projects, artist and activist Ai WeiWei worked with the craftspeople of Jingdezhen to produce an almost unfathomable 100 MILLION porcelain sunflower seeds.
Each sunflower seed is produced using a ceramic mold, then cleaned up a bit, handpainted and fired in a kiln. The final results are almost indestinguishable from the real thing. I had the opportunity to see a full ton of Ai WeiWei's sunflower seeds at an exhibition put together by Arcadia University (that subsequently traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Porland), and even that relatively small amount of seeds shifted my paradigm. By contrast, the Tate Modern contains over 150 million tons of the porcelain seeds.
Ai WeiWei always speaks eliptically about his work. Every time you think you might have the meaning pinned down, new meanings emerge. According to the artist, the sunflower theme references sunflower seeds surrounding Mao like the sun. The Mao theme is definitely taken with a nudge and a wink, as WeiWei is currently under house arrest, struggling with the Chinese government, which is harassing him by attempting to shut down his studio in Shanghai, supposedly because it was built without the proper permits (this from the government that allows improperly built apartment buildings to topple like dominoes).
In addition to press that he has received for his house arrest, Ai WeiWei also got a lot of attention when the Tate Modern had to temporarily close his exhibition because visitors walking through the sunflower seeds were kicking up enough ceramic dust to harm the lungs of the spectators. Fortunately, the exhibition was re-opened several days later, but spectators are no longer allowed to walk through the seeds.
I can testify to the vastness of Jingdezhen and its capacity to create massive amounts of product. By Ai WeiWei's estimate, more than 1600 people were employed in Jingdezhen to produce the Tate exhibition. Enjoy the video that I posted above. It shows Jingdezhen in all of its squalor and glory. The young women in Jingdezhen almost always dress to the nines when they're working in the studio. The footage in the video of ladies in their high heels is right in line with my own experience.
In addition to the sheer, unknowable vastness of the project, I love Ai WeiWei's talk of the exhibition as a form of craftivism--calling attention to the machinations ofJingdezhen while employing massive numbers of people who could use the work (the state porcelain factories there were shut down about a decade ago). The whole town is one big gossip mill, so the fact that Ai WeiWei views the prospect of the exhibition creating an urban legend about the production of the sunflower seeds is another interesting angle that I hadn't considered.
Enjoy the video, and decide for yourself how you'd like to think about the project. I've been reading about the project for quite a while now, so it was interesting to put a human face on something with such an inhuman scale.
LINK to the video
LINK to the Tate Modern Exhibition
