User:Hillbillyholiday/sandbox

Sunflower seeds. Ai Weiwei. TateMo 2011

Sunflower Seeds was a 2010 installation by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. The work consisted of one hundred million individually hand-crafted porcelain sunflower seeds which filled 1000 m2 of the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern to depth of ten centimetres. The work was exhibited from 12 October 2010 to 2 May 2011, smaller collections of the seeds have been exhibited elsewhere since and some have been sold at auction.

Manufacture

Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds, Tate Modern

'Sunflower Seeds' by Ai Weiwei, Tate Modern Turbine Hall

The sunflower seeds were made Jingdezhen, China, a town known as the Porcelain Capital, which for over a thousand years was the center of imperial porcelain manufacture. Over 1,600 artisans worked for two and a half years to manufacture this huge pile of ceramic husks out of the kaolin from local mountains. After a striking 30-step procedure, each seed, hand-painted and fired at 1,300 degrees, is unique and unpredictable.

For Ai, sunflower seeds – a common street snack shared by friends – carry personal associations with Mao Zedong's brutal Cultural Revolution (1966–76). "While individuals were stripped of personal freedom, propaganda images depicted Chairman Mao as the sun and the mass of people as sunflowers turning towards him. Yet Ai remembers the sharing of sunflower seeds as a gesture of human compassion, providing a space for pleasure, friendship and kindness during a time of extreme poverty, repression and uncertainty."

"In China, when we grew up, we had nothing … But for even the poorest people, the treat or the treasure we’d have would be the sunflower seeds in everybody’s pockets. It’s a work about mass production and repeatedly accumulating the small effort of individuals to become a massive, useless piece of work. China is blindly producing for the demands of the market … My work very much relates to this blind production of things. I'm part of it, which is a bit of a nonsense."

It's done through your own control of the brush and your own breath and your own bodily gestures. It's such a beautiful act - using fingers and brush."

Collaborator Liu Weiwei: "..the porcelain stone is excavated by hand, pulverized, and mixed by hand. The clay is hand-pressed into millions of pieces that are baked and dumped into large sacks ... delivered to stufios where each piece is painted by hand, then sent back for another firing, after which it's hand-polished and dried."

Reviews

Andrew Graham-Dixon drew parallels with Van Dyck's Self-Portrait with Sunflower, "Ai Weiwei's multitude of seeds face and follow no one. They form a fragmented world, something atomised, smashed to rubble. And maybe that's what they're truly meant to portend: the fall of China's old guard, the dismantling of the totalitarian system, which will take place as surely as every tide will always turn."

"This, in the end, is rather a melancholy piece. It allows us to think about those who are repressed, and of those flowers that are killed off before they have the chance to grow and bloom bright. But it’s also about our responsibilities to one another, and the energy we share, and so it contains a seed of hope. Make that 100 million seeds of hope."

Adrian Searle: "It is also a singular statement, in a familiar, minimal form – like Wolfgang Laib's floor-bound rectangles of yellow pollen, Richard Long's stones or Antony Gormley's fields of thousands of little humanoids.Field (sculpture) Sunflower Seeds, however, is better. It is audacious, subtle, unexpected but inevitable. It is a work of great simplicity and complexity. The meanings are as multiple and singular as its form. Ai Weiwei has taken the lesson of Duchamp's readymade and Warhol's multiples and turned them into a lesson in Chinese history and western modernisation, and the price individuals in China pay for that. Ai is the best artist to have appeared since the Cultural Revolution in China."

Exhibition

"Sunflower Seeds was extended beyond the Turbine Hall through Twitter. Booths alongside the work allowed visitors to pose questions directly to Ai via video, to which he replied on the Tate website. From these responses, it is evident that Ai feels the work’s role, and his role as artist, is to hint at universal questions concerning obligations, values, strengths, rights and materialism in society, and through these to challenge fixed power structures. Sunflower Seeds was meticulous, beautiful, sparse, suggestive, even emotional, but it was not prescriptive. It may have suggested connections, posed questions and inspired action, but the final interpretation, and the final decision about whether, and how, to act, was the viewer’s own."

At first, visitors to the Turbine Hall were allowed to walk over the work. Fears over the quantites of dust raised from the seeds caused the work to be roped off. Will Gompertz BBC art critic "Standing or kneeling at the rim will be a bit like looking at an empty picture frame instead of one that actually has a picture in it."

Auctions and sales

The Tate has acquired approximately 8 million individual sculptures, 10 tonnes .. displayed as a cone five metres in diameter and one and a half metres tall – as they have been displayed at Tate Modern as a loan from the artist from last June until earlier this year.

An initial auction in early 2011 at Sotheby's in London for 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of Ai WeiWei's seeds fetched $559,394. a further sale at Sotheby's in New York on Wednesday generated $782,000.