Renowned 'watchdog' artist Ai Weiwei's works coming to Pittsburgh

Since the 1980s, Chinese contemporary art has made a huge impact on the international scene and continues to be one of the art world's major areas of focus.

With countless new museums, galleries and talents coming to the fore, China has a great number of influential art-world players. But one artist in particular tops this list, and that's Ai Weiwei (his name is pronounced eye way-way).

Pittsburghers will get two chances to explore the art of this world-renowned dissident artist.

Opening May 28 in the Carnegie Museum of Art's Hall of Architecture, Ai's iconic “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” gives scale to this art-world giant.

On the weekend of June 4, the exhibit “Andy Warhol/Ai Weiwei” opens at the Andy Warhol Museum with a visit by the artist.

Ai Weiwei's first major public-sculpture project, “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” comprises a dozen 10-foot-tall bronze figures, representing the traditional Chinese zodiac. Each weighs about 2,000 pounds, making for an ominous site among the plaster casts of the past.

“In terms of impact, I can certainly say that Ai Weiwei is the most important artist working today,” says Eric Shiner, director of the Andy Warhol Museum. “He is, in so many ways, acting as a watchdog. Not only in our rarefied world of contemporary art, but much more importantly, the world at large. He is taking on issues that are political, that are timely to all of us, and critically important. For example, the refugee crisis in Greece, and by extension, the rest of Europe, is something that he's paying deep attention to and really calling attention to various political systems, various atrocities that are happening to humanity that we might not otherwise pay attention to.”

Shiner says the exhibit at his museum shows a “different view of each artist.”

“Warhol was much more subvert in his political actions and his mechanizations of change, whereas Weiwei is incredibly overt,” Shiner says. “The premise of this exhibition, at the end of the day, is how these two artists, probably more than anyone, changed and are changing the very fabric of the societies within which they work.”

The exhibit captures self-portraits of a young Ai and other seminal Chinese avant-garde artists in their earlier days, such as Xu Bing, a Chinese-born artist who lived in the United States for 18 years that included the 1980s in New York, when Warhol's career and social prominence were at an all-time high.

It also offers glimpses of Ai's early fascination with protest power, including capturing the Tompkins Square Park riot in 1988 in New York City's East Village, a neighborhood that, at the time, was home to many artists.

Shiner says that Ai, like many Chinese artists at the time, needed to get out of China.

“Most dissident artists went to Europe,” Shiner says. “However, both Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing made their way to New York, both of them specifically to be in the sphere of Warhol.

“Weiwei, especially, really felt the aura of Warhol around him and started off almost all of his projects, and continues to do so, through the lens of either Warhol, and certainly another point of reference that they both share, Marcel Duchamp.”

Duchamp was a French naturalized-American painter, sculptor, chess player and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, conceptual art and Dada, an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century.

One piece that is an obvious nod to the latter is “Grapes,” which calls to mind Duchamp's readymades, in which ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified were made as an antidote to what he called “retinal art.”

“Grapes” is made of 32 Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) stools joined together to form a semi-spherical bowl. Ai has asserted that these three-legged stools are a fundamental expression of the aesthetic of rural China; they can be found in every countryside home, often passed down through the generations. In repurposing the stool into an entirely new form, he points to the potency and rapidity of the social, economic, political and artistic changes facing China in the 21st century.

Another piece that exemplifies the artist's penchant for pushing the boundaries is “Han Dynasty Urn with Coca Cola logo (Silver)” from 2007, in which Ai painted a Coca-Cola logo on a 2,000-year-old vase.

“When you think about the value of a work of art, the value of an antique, what does adding a commercial logo to a centuries-old vase mean? It actually, strangely, increases it in value as a work of contemporary art,” Shiner says. “So, he's calling into question those things, but, of course, in the context of the ready-made.”

Likewise, in the 1960s, Warhol used the well-recognized imagery of mass-produced Coca-Cola bottles, painting them and filling them with perfume he labeled “You're In/Eau d'Andy.” The Coca-Cola Co. responded with a cease-and-desist letter. Warhol often created these works in such a way as to question what is sacred and what people worship in modern society.

“Of course, Warhol looked to Duchamp readily and vigorously, also, and that's a bond these two artists share,” Shiner says.

On display in Carnegie Museum of Art's Hall of Architecture, Ai's “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” is a re-interpretation of the 12 bronze animal heads of the traditional Chinese zodiac that once were at Yuanming Yuan, an imperial retreat in Beijing. Designed in the 18th century, the 12 zodiac animal heads originally functioned as a water clock-fountain, which was sited in the magnificent European-style gardens of the Yuanming Yuan.

In 1860, the Yuanming Yuan was ransacked by French and British troops, and the heads were pillaged. In re-interpreting these objects on an oversized scale, Ai Weiwei focuses attention on questions of looting and repatriation, while extending his ongoing exploration of the fake and the copy in relation to the original.

Additionally, Shiner is quick to point out that these long-recognized Chinese cultural treasures were not created by Chinese artists, but rather by two European Jesuits serving in the court of the Qing dynasty Emperor Qianlong.

“So, in fact, they weren't really Chinese at all,” says Shiner, in regard to the original works. “So, Ai Weiwei is asking, are these important Chinese cultural property, or are these important European cultural property? And that's why he decided to make them large-scale and travel them all over the world.”

The official world tour for “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” was launched in May 2011 in New York City at the historic Pulitzer Fountain at Grand Army Plaza and is the centerpiece of a global, multi-year touring exhibition that will be presented in the United States, Europe and Asia.

As for Ai, he's currently in Lesbos, filming a documentary about the refugee situation in Greece. But he will be in Pittsburgh for the opening weekend at the Warhol, when he will hold a public conversation with Shiner at Carnegie Music Hall, Oakland.

Kurt Shaw is the Tribune-Review art critic. Reach him at tribliving@tribweb.com.