Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei grew up as the son of famous poet, Ai Qing.  So it's no surprise how Ai Weiwei developed a passion for art.  Ai Weiwei is a mixed artist, known to make sculptures, use photographs, and create installed pieces of art in different places to express his message.  Ai Weiwei is also known as a political activist using his art as a medium to convey his message.  Most of his art is thought provoking and tackle many social issues that take place in the world.  Usually Ai Weiwei will use the space he has available to his advantage when making his installed art spacing things out very carefully, to create the illusion and thought he wants to get across to the viewers.  He tends to use salvaged items that are traditionally Chinese in his sculptural pieces.  However his installation work is what spoke to me the most.  Weiwei created a piece called Untitled which is installed at Harvard university.  This piece takes 5,335 students backpacks who were killed in the 2008 Sichuan Province earthquakes and pairs this together with the audio of Remembrance which is an audio that says every students name that was killed.  It is a very emotional and strong piece paired together.  The way the backpacks are arranged in clusters gives you the feeling of the overwhelming lose of life in the incident, along with the very haunting voice stating the names makes this a very touching piece.  Ai Weiwei had to employ a citizen investigation in order to get the student names since the Chinese government was hiding it from the public.  Because of that this piece serves as both a tribute to those lost and a slap in the face to the Chinese government for hiding this information.

Ai Weiwei's "Untitled" at Harvard University.