Beschreibung:

Ai Weiwei Follow He Xie porcelain, in approximately 2,300 parts dimensions variable Executed in 2010.
Provenance Frahm Ltd., Hong Kong Private Collection, Europe Exhibited New York, Mary Boone Gallery, Ai Weiwei Forge, 19 October - 21 December 2012, pp. 58-59, 62-65 (another variant illustrated) Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Brooklyn Museum, Ai Weiwei According to What? , 7 October 2012 - 10 August 2014, pp. 2-3, 133, 134-135, 138 (another variant exhibited and illustrated, pp. 2-3, 134-135) Berlin, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Ai Weiwei - Evidence , 3 April - 7 July 2014, pp. 162-165 (another variant exhibited and illustrated, pp. 162, 164-165) Woodstock, Blenheim Art Foundation, Blenheim Palace, Ai Weiwei at Blenheim Palace , 1 October 2014 - 26 April 2015, pp. 86-89 (another variant exhibited and illustrated on cover, pp. 86-87, 89) London, Royal Academy of Arts, Ai Weiwei , 19 September - 13 December 2015, pp. 148, 150-151 (another variant exhibited and illustrated, pp. 150-151) Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, Ai Weiwei Libero , 23 September 2016 - 22 January 2017, pp. 24-25, 136-139 (another variant exhibited and illustrated, pp. 24, 25, 137, 138-139) Literature Ai Weiwei @ Helsinki , exh.cat., Maija Tanninen-Mattila, Helsinki, 2015, p. 35 (another variant illustrated) Hans Werner Holzwarth, ed., Ai Weiwei , Cologne, 2016, pp. 478-481, 596 (another variant illustrated, pp. 479, 480-481) Catalogue Essay Ai Weiwei’s He Xie , 2010, presents the viewer with 2,300 porcelain crabs, piled on one another and scattered on foreign ground. Usually nestled in corners of gallery spaces or placed centre stage in vacant museum rooms, the installation’s lifeless crustaceans are as though removed from their traditional habitat and thrown into an artificial spotlight, unsuspectedly becoming prey to any passing visitor’s scrutiny. While this random display of static figurines in artistic contexts may seem harmless and even humorous at first, one may easily infer, upon further reflection, the installation’s daunting political implications. In other words, and as often with Ai Weiwei’s works, apparent simplicity betrays plural meaning, while seemingly gentle surfaces readily uncover thorny foundations. In the case of He Xie , the transformation of a species’ living environment into a space open for spectatorship symbolically refers to the methods of exposure utilised by China’s surveillance state. With increasingly powerful technologies enabling wider arenas for census and tighter control systems, access to online and offline resources have been limited, and individual freedoms have been restricted over time. In performing a pretend displacement of marine life, Ai Weiwei thus brings forth issues of privacy and human rights at large. The sense of displacement entailed by the crabs’ dislocation furthermore bears lexical ramifications. He Xie , translating to either ‘harmony’ or its homophone ‘water crab’ in Chinese Mandarin, indeed possesses concealed undertones, brimming with political hues. Around the time of the present work’s creation, the expression ‘he xie’ was thrust beyond its literal meaning by internet users to designate online censorship in China, satirically subverting the government’s appropriated notion of ‘harmony’, instead giving it the face of a crab. Proliferating on forums as well as the rare accessible social platforms, crustacean iconography was thus extracted from its original semantic universe and propelled into political ground. This practice of subversion is not unfamiliar to Ai Weiwei In one of his more solemnly striking works, executed a year before the present installation, the Beijing-born artist spent a year looking into a political coverup involving poorly constructed schools which had succumbed to a natural disaster in Sichuan, 2008. Tens of thousands of young students were trapped underneath the weakened walls, culminating in an appalling death toll exceeding five thousand. Following Ai’