Ai Wei Wei: Artist and Film maker

In starting to try and understand the messages and principles of postmodernism, I was introduced to an artist, Ai Wei Wei, in class so looked more closely at his work. I was initially fascinated by an installation called Kippe (2006)




I was drawn to this piece out of all the images of his work in the reference: "Ai Wei Wei" (2016) pub: Royal Academy of Arts, London. From a visual perspective the wood pieces are pieced together so intricately to form what looks like a perfect dimension cuboid. The contrast of size, wood tone and decorative pieces is enthrawling. It seems like the past being packed away, forming its own transportable packing box.  The pieces are framents from dismantled temples of previous chinese dynasies. Its recycling but its also a comment on the current era and what these elements meant. I wanted to know what A Wei Wei was trying to say:

Ai's Kippe, too, was another work that stands out for its warmth, beauty, and personal qualities. Appearing to be an enormous pile of wood stacked for the fireplace or oven, it is packed perfectly tightly to form a flawless block. It incorporates architectural ornaments, mere splinters, and slices from cross-cuts of the beautiful ironwood trees. It forms a wall almost like  an oven glowing a steady heat. Who would need anything the woodpile itself does not give?

The notes connect the work to Ai's memories not only of the family's woodpile, but of the village basketball hoop (the uprights) and parallel bars, which are easily read into the structure. Is the success of this piece—its accessibility to the sensoriums and imaginations of others—a result of its genesis in Ai's lived experience? http://starr-review.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/ai-weiweis-challenges-and-questions.html

 Then there are the installations from piles of reclaimed wood, like “Kippe,” that get their strength from knowing that each piece of the sculptures was once part of a Qing Dynasty temple that was dismantled to make way for the new buildings of China. The most interesting of these temple pieces in DC was actually not in the Hirshhorn, but in another Smithsonian institution, the Sackler Gallery, where the wooden pieces were rebuilt into a sort of freeform memory of a temple, a more powerful statement than the clunkier wooden sculptures in According to What? that lost the delicate nature of the temple details in their bulk. https://hyperallergic.com/65829/the-visual-memory-of-ai-weiweis-survey-at-the-hirshhorn-museum/

In looking at his work generally I came across a trailer for a film he has made and is yet to be made available for full viewing. He is a man who is passionate about justice and injustice and uses his art, whether sculpture, installation or film-making to draw attention, bluntly and bravely, about these human injustices.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/aug/31/human-flow-review-ai-weiwei-refugee-crisis