Ai Weiwei

Sabine Eckmann, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Carol Yinghua Lu

"Over the past two decades, the Chinese conceptual artist, activist, and exile Ai Weiwei has created art that addresses complex and sensitive themes of political, ethical, and social urgency. His artworks, which call upon both Western and Chinese cultural traditions, are deeply engaged with the history of art, drawing particularly on conceptualism and minimalism. Informed by the readymade--central to the work of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol--his work questions the status of the work of art itself, blurring the lines between art and non-art, invention and appropriation, structure and openness, even fiction and fact. From the start of his multifaceted career in the late 1970s, Ai has envisioned artistic practice as a deeply human, moral, and political endeavor. This volume--a hybrid between a scholarly study and an exhibition catalog--presents the artist's work in dialogue with...