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The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney has opened Ai Weiwei's new installation Mushrooms, featuring 500 identical cast iron helmets modelled on German World War II helmets installed on Tallawoladah Lawn overlooking Sydney Harbour.
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney has opened Ai Weiwei's latest installation Mushrooms, a collection of 500 identical cast iron helmets modelled on German helmets from World War II.
The monumental, 40-metre work has been installed on Tallawoladah Lawn overlooking Sydney Harbour. The piece was inspired by Germany's offer of 5000 helmets to Ukraine immediately after Russia invaded. Ai Weiwei was living in Berlin at the time. He said: I think, is that a joke?
Because you know, 5000 helmets. That shows Germans think the war won't last too long. But it also shows Europe's uncertainty in these kinds of conflicts. It's funny, but it's also very serious.
From that starting point, the piece took on multiple meanings. Ai explained his approach to the work: I'm concentrated on myself. I am a very selfish and self-centred person. So I always think as an artist that what affects me also affects millions of people because I am just an ordinary person.
So that's how I make the work, trying to generate the emotion and curiosity I felt. What is this helmet made for? Why do we need a helmet? Of course, it is first protecting life.
We need a helmet because we are in a war. We will kill each other.
Ai Weiwei Reflects on War Sacrifice
Then the next question is, who is going to be sacrificed, and for what? I think those are crucial questions. It is necessary to ask them of the public. When Ai Weiwei was a child, he helped his father burn all his art books.
Having studied painting in Paris, Ai Qing had been condemned as a rightist during the Cultural Revolution and the family was exiled to the remote province of Xinjiang. Ai remembers: Those books were considered anti-revolution, so I tore them up page by page and threw them in the flames. Those pages, that paper made so well, some handmade papers and very hard to tear, printed so nicely, the colours beautiful.
Renaissance paintings with gold leaf, all the Impressionists, Monet, Degas, Manet, Seurat, I know all those names because I burned them. Ai Qing was by then a poet. He could not get art materials in Xinjiang, but he could write. He also told stories of his life in Paris in the 1920s, but his son was not interested.
Ai says: I was 10. I do not care. I only know the winter is so cold, the summer is so hot, we do not have enough food, we do not have water or light. They lived in a dugout; their only light source was a kerosene lamp.
You burn the oil and it is black. In the morning, my nose is black. These were very poor conditions. When I saw Manet's lady standing in a bar, flowers pinned to her chest, so beautiful, I tried to imagine this other world.
But I never thought I would be an artist because artists were cursed. His path to becoming, in fact, one of the world's best-known and most celebrated artists, if that is what he is, which remains an open question as far as he is concerned, was determined largely by chance. Nineteen years after his trial and exile, Ai Qing was rehabilitated and elevated as a leading representative of Chinese literature.
Ai Weiwei went briefly to film school in Beijing, then to the United States. In New York, he dropped out of study and lived through odd jobs. At night, he walked the city alone, like a wolf.
Ai Weiwei Trains for Art Battle
Meanwhile, he painted in a succession of different styles, educating himself. He says: I did the whole of art history. I'm like a soldier training for battle. I never lost my confidence; I was convinced I could do anything.
My problem is that I never want to do anything. This is hard to imagine: at 69, Ai's sense of mission means he never seems to stop. His most famous projects are his large public artworks, often involving multiples: thousands of sunflower seeds on the floor of the Turbine Hall in London's Tate Modern in 2010; a wall of lifejackets representing refugees risking their lives in Quebec City in 2022; an assemblage of bicycles in 2003.
He says: I did many small works people would not even notice, too many. I don't know why people are impacted by the bigger image. I think they should be impacted by concept and meaning, the content. But it seems not so.
In the end, his imperative is to communicate. In 1993, Ai returned to China from New York. He had been away for 12 years; his father was ill and died in 1996. And I stayed in China for another 22 years.
Time passed fast. I had nothing to do. I never wanted to become an artist because it was such a heavily censored authoritarian state, I never thought I would enjoy or fit into the landscape. So I made underground books to try to help local artists to communicate.
Ai Weiwei Advises Collectors
I made a gallery for them, but I never showed my own work. In that role, he became an adviser to an emerging cohort of international collectors of new Chinese art. One was the Swiss ambassador Uli Sigg, who spotted one of Ai's works, a modified Han vase painted up with a Coca-Cola logo, and said it interested him. Ai says dismissively: I would not even call it work.
He told Sigg he could have it. That was the lucky beginning of a friendship that opened many doors. In 1999, before I even had a gallery show, I was in Venice Biennale. I showed 72 photos of a lunar eclipse, the moon covered by earth and sun, Eclipse.
It was just for fun, I never thought it was art. Not making art became something of an Ai trademark. In 2007, he was invited to Documenta in Kassel, Germany, the most important contemporary art show in Europe. And I didn't make any work.
Ai Weiwei Brings Chinese to Show
I brought 1001 Chinese to see the show. For me, it was the best thing I could do. Just getting them passports was a huge project. Some lived in the mountains and had to create a name before they could apply for one.
The ladies were only called Someone's Wife, or Someone's Mother, so they had to have a name. Those things are interesting and meaningful for me. As his star rose in China's burgeoning cultural scene, Ai's compulsion to ask crucial questions inevitably led to trouble with the authorities, especially once the internet arrived. Ai spent hours every day tweeting to an engaged public; he also made a succession of documentaries about injustice, using his public forum to solicit.
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smh:This story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
Mushrooms Installation MCA Sydney 500 Helmets Tallawoladah Lawn
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