Ai Weiwei

Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing and Lucerne
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This work is accompanied with a certificate signed by the artist

This work is generally in good condition.
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Revitalizing Tradition
Ai Weiwei

Few Chinese artists have ever garnered the broad level of influence in the west as Ai Weiwei, who began making antique furniture readymades with Dadaist inflections in 1997. These pieces became the signature series of his early creative career, and Table with Table with Two Legs on the Wall (Lot 818) and Stool (Lot 819) are two classic examples.

“The alteration of a ready-made good preserves and extends the narrative structure of the old object itself, including its past, the history it bears and the marks it has acquired while being used. A conflict forms between the changes that transpire its own logic and its past functions and uses. This conflict is a forcible mispositioning and repositioning of the blind spot and the angle of our own recognition of things.”¹

This quotation from Ai regarding his own work is an illuminating footnote. These two works were created in 1997, the artist’s earliest phase of working with antique furniture; he returned to working with Qing Dynasty furniture in 2006. Each sculpture is an extension of an early prototype, but due to the uniqueness of the materials, each work is also completely distinct. Other versions of these highly representative works have been featured in many of Ai Weiwei’s large-scale solo exhibitions, and the Sigg Collection at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong includes a Table with Two Legs on the Wall.

Table with Two Legs on the Wall and Stool contain traces of Dadaism, and at the same time, they explore a new visual language within a Chinese context. This series has aroused nostalgia for traditional processes, and has brought a new lease of life to assemblage sculpture. This seems to correspond with the modernisation of China. In this manner Ai Weiwei rekindles the viewer’s memories of Chinese traditions. The artist further developed these ideas in later, larger-scale projects, including his huge installation pieces: Fragments (2005), Through (2007-2008) and Temple (2007).

Ai Weiwei draws from his own traditional culture, but he does not obsess about the past. On the contrary, he has changed the function and form of culture and art. As the renowned curator of Chinese art, Karen Smith, puts it: “[Ai] question[s] the value of all, and to unsettle the status quo, much as the interventions and actions of Duchamp and Joseph Beuys achieved”.²

¹ Liu Jung-Ren in dialog with Ai Weiwei, “Getting at the Heart of the Art: Ten Questions”, Ai Weiwei: Absent, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2014, p. 7.

² Karen Smith, Giant Provocateur, Ai Weiwei, Phaidon, 2009, p.62