#art construction

Camel art studies

Margaret Mellis 1914 - 2009.

Artist: Chiharu Shiota

Entitled: Site-specific installations (on-going series), string and other variable medium, unknown dimensions, 2012-2014 present

Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese performance and installation artist best known for creating room-filling, monumental yet delicate, poetic environments. Shiota belongs to a generation of young artists who have gained international attention in recent years for their site-specific installations.  Shiota finds diverse visual expressions for these subject matters- the most notable is the impenetrable installations made of black thread which often enclose various household and everyday personal objects.

Aritist: Ai Weiwei

Entitled: Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds), porcelain, kaolin, paint, unknown dimensions, 100 million seeds (150 tons), 2009-2010 respectively; Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds, film documentary, 15 min, 2010 (commissioned by the Tate Modern)

Ai Weiwei’s acclaimed Exhibition Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds), is a work representing society, politics and economy in China-a project that can be accomplished only in the country- commentary on globalization and mass production in China that caters to western consumerism - thousands of cheap laborers, assembly lines in gigantic factories, and repetitive work. The layers of seeds, though simple in form, embody multiple meanings- brings into focus the significance of individual identity, and the collective strength when they are one. Ai used a factory of workers to talk about factory labor and Chinese ideals concerning individuality; the contradictions are embedded in the piece-

Commissioned by the Tate, taking almost 2.5 years, 150 tons covering 1,000 square meters to a depth of ten centimeters, the installations 100 million ceramic seeds  made from kaolin, were crafted from traditional methods and delicately painted by hand by more than 1,600 artisans in Jingdezhen ( the major center for production of Imperial porcelain for over a thousand years). Ai has long been fascinated by the cultural traditions of materials and objects, and of porcelain in particular—the survival of its artisan production, its supreme quality, its early traditions of mass production and global export and the value still invested in it as a cultural artifact and a contemporary tradition in China today.

‘Sunflower Seeds’ are also a reference  to Mao Zedong, who referred to his citizens as sunflowers that follow his every move, making him the all-powerful sun. “The sunflower seed evokes the memory of hardships and hunger during the Cultural Revolution, and the era of socialist planned economy with the collective worship of the ‘sun’” - Chairman Mao.  During Mao’s reign, he enacted the Great Leap Forward, an ill-conceived campaign to modernize China away from an agrarian society that resulted in millions of deaths by starvation.

Also Ai’s father, the poet Ai Qing, was classified as an enemy of the revolution in 1957, resulting in a harsh exile in Xinjiang Province, where sunflower seeds were one of the few dietary luxuries. Among the exiles there, the sharing of seeds provided a moment of covert community solidarity. Ai has early memories of his mother hulling seeds with her teeth, proficiently preserving the kernel—the seeds still communicate such simple acts of pleasure in an increasingly complex world. Ai Weiwei has become China’s most famous living artist not just for the internationally admired quality of his work, but for his troubles with his native country, where he has recently faced house arrest, investigation for "spreading pornography" and the demolition of his art studio.  

To Ai Weiwei, “after the Cultural Revolution, muscles were still not built up to laugh or show emotion. When you saw a little bit of color—like a yellow umbrella in the rain—it was quite shocking. The society was all gray, and a little bit blue.” “There are no heroes in modern China,” Ai says “where the political authorities prize conformity, discipline and the accumulation of riches, an artist working in the provocative Western tradition is still regarded as a threat. Chinese intellectuals may support him, but the Chinese generally have no more understanding of Ai than a typical American has of Duchamp or Warhol.” The West would like to turn Ai into a hero, but he seems reluctant to oblige. He lived in postmodern New York. He knows the celebrity racket and the hero racket. “My resistance is a symbolic gesture” Ai says.

Sunflower Seeds…the painting of so many individual seeds is a slightly mad tour de force. But the scale of the work, which is at once tiny and vast—raindrop and ocean—seems no crazier than a “Made in China” consumer society and its bottomless desires.

'Sunflower Seeds' expresses Ai Weiwei’s -… “Seeds grow...The crowd will have its way, eventually.”

Check out Ai Weiwei's other great 2min video filmed at the Tate Modern in London.

Sources:  Ai Weiwei Seeds | Tate Modern | Tate Youtube Channel | Smithsonian Magazine | The Guardian | Art Asia Pacific | Hyper Allergic

Artist: Rebecca Louise Law

Entitled: Untitled, installation, site-specific, various dimensions, floral and fauna mediums, various dates

Artist Rebecca Louise Law, b.1980 Cambridge, graduating from Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne with a BA in Fine Art 2004, is an East London Floral Installation Artist.

Working with natural organic visual mediums for over 17 years, Law reconfigures large-scale site-specific installation spaces using thousands of suspended flora and fauna arrangements.  Her work is translated through connections of space and time interwoven between Mother Nature and Human Nature. “I imagine these themes in real life and times that by a thousand so that it becomes fantasy,” says Law.

Sources: This is Colossal | Yellowtrace | Visual News