Ai Weiwei Model

Ai Weiwei Model: Internationally acclaimed Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has been much in the news lately. On 3 April this year he was detained at the Beijing airport while en route to Hong Kong, and his papers and computers were seized from his studio compound.

In Britain, he is possibly best known for his Tate Modern installation “Sunflower Seeds” that was part of the Unilever series, and was shown between 12 October 2010 and 2 May 2011.Tate Modern: “Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique. However realistic they may seem, these life-sized sunflower seed husks are in fact intricately hand-crafted in porcelain.

 Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands. Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape.
Porcelain is almost synonymous with China and, to make this work, Ai Weiwei has manipulated traditional methods of crafting what has historically been one of China’s most prized exports. Sunflower Seeds invites us to look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today.”