12/31/2023 0 Comments Ai wei wei shan hai jing![]() ![]() While the Chinese government continues to repress art, Life Cycle is a liberation of Chinese spirituality as Ai reverts to ancient mythology. Through his use of ancient fantasy, his utopian vision of a China sans communism beams through the works. In a meditation on contemporary Chinese life, in Life Cycle, Ai takes his journey on documenting the global refugee crisis closer to home by using traditional Chinese materials and mythology to explore contemporary Chinese society and demonstrate how exiled art will be the only way to push China forward. ![]() With the recent demolition of his Beijing studio, the artist turns his lens back on China for his first major institutional show in Los Angeles, Ai Weiwei: Life Cycle, running until March 3, 2019, at Marciano Art Foundation. When we see that this year alone damaging rulings such as China’s ban of hip hop and queer themes from television didn’t appear once in contemporary Chinese art, but only from those living on the margins, Ai’s theory stands in full validation. His comment fuels the idea that true Chinese art only comes from the country’s radical physical and social exiles (like when he smashed a 2000-year-old Han Dynasty urn in 1995). Speaking with The Guardian, the artist explained that in his home country, art is a consumerist offering that provides little in the way of a genuine experience of China. In 2012, Ai Weiwei argued that China’s art world does not exist. ![]()
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