“You obviously want the viewer to participate in the act of seeing, and they can do this by trying to understand how the work is made,” Ai Weiwei tells me as we examine his colorful and colossal LEGO brick works on view in “Child’s Play,” an exhibition spanning two Vito Schnabel Gallery locations in Manhattan. “Everybody has some toy-building and digital gaming experience, so that attempt to understand becomes interesting when looking at the work. But it’s not just about construction, it’s about deconstruction at the same time—and that is quite interesting.”
The pieces on show, built with bricks and mounted on aluminum, are a vibrant reminder that the legendary conceptual artist is nothing if not provocative. To provoke, in Ai’s case, is to defy the very fabric of our common narratives, our cultural canons and the endless stream of all-hours news feeds. As Ai explains to me, defiance is the work of the “modern individual to locate themselves” among the masses. For him, that work comes in the innovative exploration of unexpected media, like LEGO bricks, because such “readymade” material is commonly used by those masses and offers his viewers a way into the art. Other key points of entry are images and subjects drawn from pop-cultural highlights and venerated historical paintings. Within those selections, Ai leaves us flies in the ointment—telling clues that something has gone awry; true provocations with which to explore critical ideas that may help us find the freedoms we seek and the control we once gave up without knowing.
On the back wall of Schnabel’s warm and inviting West Village gallery is one of Ai Weiwei’s more significant works in the show, Sleeping Venus with Coat Hanger, from 2022. A take on the famous Sleeping Venus attributed to Italian Renaissance painters Giorgio da Castelfranco and Titian, it’s hard to say who started or finished the original—and what constitutes authorship. That iconic painting’s subtle earthen hues affirm the realistic floral forms and beautiful figurative nude depicted. Ai’s LEGO counterpart, on the other hand, features a more limited color palette and has the look of a brighter, low-res, kid’s video game version of the original. As with many of the pixel-like works in the show, it raises germane questions about what’s an original, what’s a facsimile, who’s the media maker—and how does that matter in today’s easy-access age of infinite digital reproduction, storage and retrieval?
DON’T MISS: Talking With Ai Weiwei About the Art of Play
Sleeping Venus with Coat Hanger also asks other relevant, right-now questions. In the original, the nude female Venus figure was displayed simply as an ideal of beauty and purity without narrative context—highly unusual back then. The Venus in Ai’s piece, while largely true to the original, however, features a titular anomaly—that fly in the ointment. In the lower-left corner of the work sits an unavoidable hot pink metal coat hanger, symbolizing the crude emergency tool used by some women to self-terminate pregnancy when unable to access critical medical care. With that, Ai provides a contemporary context that reminds us of recent regional abortion bans spreading around the U.S., which have stirred up great controversy over the protection of women’s reproductive rights. Has Ai’s Venus—and all that she represents—been exploited, objectified and stripped of her rights, modesty and decency? Ai’s piece seems to suggest that. A master of shining light on such specific, insidious injustices, Ai does so with aplomb in this work.
Heading uptown, I reach the West 19th Street gallery where a large, colorful, Warhol-like, four-panel, LEGO self-portrait of the bearded, aging artist is displayed behind a storefront window. It seems to intone as much about the varying states of Ai as it does about how he’s perceived. A continuous string of drips edge into the square grid of each repeated self-portrait we see. The white and red trickling swaths resemble paint, or possibly blood, joining the left-to-right portraits together, perhaps letting us know that the personal blood loss and suffering of the artist rides with him throughout his journey in life—but could equally be about the veil of illusion we all live behind.
Around the corner hang some of the showstoppers in the exhibition. One of my favorites,
Here again, flies catch in the ointment and among those flies is Ai himself—his position, his past, his person. For Ai Weiwei, Monet’s imagery was a meditation on his own past—providing a kind of space and time travel. As the story goes, Ai’s father, Ai Qing, a famous intellectual and poet—an enemy of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution—was exiled with the younger Ai. Weiwei and Qing essentially lived in a hole in the ground until freed several years later when Mao died and the Revolution fell apart. While not particularly close with him, Ai Qing did wax on to his son during that tough time about his exciting, hopeful younger years studying art in Paris and his fascination with Monet’s late-era work. In Ai’s LEGO depiction of those
When I look closely at the small, square LEGO blocks in
Other works in “Child’s Play” refer to mostly Western, firmly famous, mid-century figurative and landscape paintings—from Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World made in 1948 to Balthus’ provocative Thérèse Dreaming, from 1938. In each of those originals, we see vulnerable and sympathetic young women—one stranded, crippled and reaching uphill toward home; the other, a prepubescent girl with one leg raised, perhaps fantasizing about her future or dreaming of that which is forever unknowable to us. In Ai’s LEGO adaptation, we see his anomalies: to Wyeth’s work, he includes an image of his unfinished, real-life Portuguese studio in place of Christina’s home, and in the Balthus, he places an image of one of his famous ancient Han Dynasty readymade jars, which is modified—or desecrated, depending on how you look at it—with a Coca-Cola logo, sitting behind Thérèse on a cabinet. Looking at Ai’s Christina’s World, I wonder how much the artist feels like the helpless girl reaching for home, aching to get back to his new studio—modeled after his studio in Shanghai, which was destroyed by Chinese authorities—as well as to enjoy the solace of the warm Portuguese countryside he now calls home. Ai tells me Wyeth’s style of idealized, dry realism was favored in China in the 1980s. It seems his LEGO work, colored with flourishes of Impressionist pink and blue, is a loose break from that form and most of the traditions that reinforced the state ideology that many Chinese artists supported at the time.
Ai and I next look at The U.S. Navy collecting the remnants of a Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon shot down by an Air Force fighter from 2023. The long-winded title tells all. I do, however, notice the anomaly in this piece and I point out the American flag—taken from the famous 19th-century Washington Crossing the Delaware painting by Emanuel Leutze—planted in the image of a modern U.S. naval boat. It feels like a symbol of false heroism, which Ai agrees with. We both muse over the absurdity of the effort to shoot the foreign object down, which was ultimately deemed a weather balloon with low-grade, inactive communications and navigation capabilities that had simply floated off track.
Of course, Ai has been through the wringer of repression and incarceration in his life, so there’s an intense need to expose deep and relevant controversies with his works. As much as he inserts his personal history and impresses his stamp on each piece of iconic art or news item that he quotes, that gesture to break form and connect the present with the past is a way for Ai to ask questions, not only about what and how we perceive but, just as importantly, about what we remember that carries forth today—and shows up perennially.
In an age when looking back at the past is as important as resolving it, Ai is also teaching us, the viewers, what to do in the present with our memories and our interpretations. By making his works from common plastic toy bricks that look like pervasive digital pixels, he gives us the opportunity to think about ideas, images and information as fun and amenable material constructions, which we have the power to accept, deny and change. That power is freedom: freedom from control of the state, freedom from biased news, freedom from the masses that often squash the individual voice, of which Ai is such an unshakable champion.
While the work of Ai Weiwei questions the building blocks of our perception, our shifting morals, our inured states of being and seeing, he’s also commenting on how it’s done. Maybe he’s reiterating Marshall Mcluhan’s classic “medium is the message” axiom here. In doing so, he highlights how the construction and deconstruction of leading and emerging narratives—the mirrors of reality itself—can be a regular activity of both information spinners and information consumers. Or he’s simply suggesting that we play with these ideas—and by keeping them in play—no single or dominant ideation will take over and oppress us any longer. And perhaps, at last, this will set us free.
“Ai Weiwei: Child’s Play” is at Vito Schnabel Gallery through February 22, 2025.
