It’s been a while since I’ve been blogging, mainly since my schedule for the rest of my stay in Asia has been quite tight. But after a visiting an exhibition of Ai Weiwei 艾未未 in Roppongi 六本木 this week which left me with conflicting feelings, I figured I should give some thoughts on what I have seen.

A little background knowledge first: Ai Weiwei is a famous contemporary Chinese artist with an interesting past. He grew up in Beijing and Xinjiang and lived in New York for more than a decade. In the West he is best known for his collaboration in the design of the famous ‘Bird’s Nest’, one of the stadiums for last year’s Beijing Olympics. Not always uncritical of the Chinese government he certainly had his share of trouble. Only this year his blog was shut down when he tried to publish material relating to an investigation into the number of students who died during the 2008 Sichuan earthquakes.

I have to admit that I only heard his name once in a while, but largely ingored him so far. Yet, perhaps owing to his huge reputation, even I occasionally stumbled across his works and, although much of modern Chinese art is said to be overvalued and superficial, I liked what I saw. Now I am the last person who would qualify as a critic of art, but being a more-or-less average guy who has some knowledge of East Asian history and speaks Chinese reasonably well, I think I could be a good average measure.

I only stumbled across his exhibition by chance while paying a visit to the Chinese embassy in Roppongi, running into a huge billboard at the exit of Roppongi Station on the Hibiya Line. I didn’t follow the Chinese art scene much, but I went to my share of galleries and art centres while living in China, so I figured this could be a good opportunity to check out the much-talked-about artist. I went to see the exhibition the following week. It was held in a rather fancy location: in the Mori Art Museum 森美術館, located on the 53th floor of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower 六本木ヒルズ森タワー. Students get in for 1,000 Yen, which includes free admission to the observation platform. Quite a strange way to get yourself in the mood for an exhibition, but not necessarily a bad one.

As good a location as Roppongi may seem to be, at least for me it is the least attractive part of Tokyo — particularly the central parts along the main street and Roppongi Hills feel like anything but Japan. At daytime the area is full of foreign Yuppies, everything from restaurants to clothes stores is incredibly expensive and, simply put, the place gives off bad vibes. At night Roppongi turns into a little Pattaya. There are night clubs catering especially to foreign men and Japanese women, host clubs and plenty of massage parlours. Violence, dirt, human trash. That and the fact that there was no Chinese throughout the whole exhibition made me wonder what this was all about when I entered the first room.

Nevertheless, I found that the exhibition managed to get off on a good start. Items were placed in an enormous white room with lots of natural light. Everything was kept very simplistic, reduced to its basics, which I found very appealing. There was plenty of space between the objects, leaving enough room to contemplate them without being distracted by anything around you. Photographing was allowed, too, which I liked. Art is something liberal, so it should be treated that way. Citations of Ai Weiwei were dotted sporadically along the white walls and short explanations next to each object contained useful information on each piece without overwhelming casual visitors like me. Sometimes they would reveal small surprises — for example, by telling you that the big cube you are looking at is actually made of compressed tea leaves.

But after a while things got somewhat trivial, or even banal. Although Ai Weiwei certainly has an aptitude for presenting art in a very light, accessible way, his next pieces were disappointing. After a tea cube came a model of a house … again made of tea. Further on, there was a room where a movie was shown of a day when Ai Weiwei was driving through Beijing on Chang’an Avenue 长安街, stopping every 50 meters to record a one minute video. The concept certainly had potential, but was executed poorly. The stops were too close to one another, ‘one minute’ was a rather rough guess (scenes turned out to be around two to three minutes long) and all in all it simply wasn’t very interesting, since the camera was stubbornly pointed in the same direction all the time, sometimes recording a new, unoccupied apartment block for two to three minutes where not a soul moved. The result was a film which was hours long — and who, of even the most serious art fans, is going to watch more than half an hour of this?

Another odd piece was a snake made of school bags. I wasn’t sure what to make of it (snakes evoke different meanings in different cultures), so I read the explanation and found out that it was supposed to be a memorial to the school children who died in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake in Wenchuan 汶川. While the earthquake was a big tragedy, I didn’t particularly like seeing this in an art exhibition. It made me think of all the media attention the earthquake and the aftermath have received, so it was a little like watching the evening news on TV, not like walking an art gallery. I am not saying that art shouldn’t reflect upon real life happenings, but I found that this piece didn’t fit here. Think of it like going to a gallery of modern art and finding a huge memorial dedicated to soldiers fallen in World War II. After a house made of tea, you would most likely feel upset in some way, however creatively presented the piece would be.

In the next room things picked up a notch. Ai presented pieces with fascinating background stories relating to his childhood in Xinjiang. But then you turn around only to see a big piece of wood in the shape of China and you can’t help but think “Come on, try harder, Ai Weiwei!” I was starting to get annoyed by the occasional patriotism in his works, but thankfully this feeling didn’t last long as I turned towards more interesting objects, such as an old table cut in half and propped up against the wall, which was refreshing after so many pieces loaden with context and political connotations.

Nevertheless, what I had seen up to this point was still rather mediocre and lacked innovation. But then, I thought, does art necessarily have to be creative, profound, deep? Does it have to entertain us and suit our tastes and values? Can’t art just exist for itself? I can’t say that I liked everything in the exhibition, but on the other hand I have rarely given so much thought on what I have seen at an art gallery before. Still feeling confused I continued reading Ai’s explanations, only to find out that many of his works are made of Chinese antiques. In this way, I found a series of photos quite disturbing which portrayed the artist dropping an antique vase, thousands of years old. In a quote on the wall, Ai said he does this to destroy the values of authority and tradition, represented by these objects, and to question their meaning. Hell, I understand that he has a certain artistic intention and tries to create a new piece of art by doing this, but in the end he still destroyed a vase and with it thousands of years of cultural tradition!

Only after a while did I really understand what Ai tries to convey. I went over his explanations again a few more times, but it wasn’t until I came back home and started reading more about his life and his past that I came to understand him. Although art shouldn’t need any explanations, this background information was essential. The Sichuan earthquake, for example, is of special imporance to him as it relates to an quarrel with the Chinese authorities who would rather not let people draw conclusions about the corruption involved in poorly constructed school buildings. The reason Ai ‘abuses’ Chinese antiques in the way he does is because he tries to discover new meaning by dismantling and transforming cultural objects. This becomes more clear after looking at the objects featured towards the end of his exhibtion. I especially liked two pieces: a small Tang Dynasty 唐朝 statue in a bottle of Absolut Vodka and a pottery jar with a Coca Cola logo painted on. As Ai points out himself, these objects symbolize changes in tastes, aesthetics and human desires, the contradictions between traditional crafts and mass-produced objects, the past and the present, the East and the West.

The last piece in his exhibition was an enormous structure assembled of parts leftover from previous antiques. The explanation was somewhat vague, but the central point was something like ‘if you look at the structure from above, it resembles the shape of China’.

I can’t help but look at Ai Weiwei and get the feeling that I am looking at an honest, nice and creative person. Yet I also feel that he needs to free himself from his traditional ways of thinking in order to create something truly exceptional. ‘According to what?’ is something I tended to ask myself quite a few times during his exhibition.

> Mori Mueum: Ai Weiwei – According to what?