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(Image credit: hyperallergic.com)

I’ve been a fan of Ai Weiwei’s work ever since the Sunflower Seeds exhibition at the Tate (October 2010). In that work, Ai commissioned 1,600 Chinese artisans from the town of Jingdezhen (a town that’s been producing pottery for nearly 2 millennia) to hand-paint 100,000,000 porcelain sunflower seeds, and the pieces were then scattered evenly on the floor of the museum’s great hall. Visitors were initially allowed onto the seeds, making the spot a lovely place to pass an afternoon. What drew me to the exhibit and its creator were not the political implications of the installation (which I’d come to respect later) or the smart way in which Ai decided to fill the Tate’s space, but rather the fact that 8 million extra seeds had been created to account for visitors taking a handful on their way out. It’s probably fair to say that most artists invited to fill the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall are rather finicky about their work, but here was someone honest enough to account for the fact that visitors might be tempted to take a piece home with them.

(Image credit: Loz Pycock)

As I’ve occasionally thought about this installation throughout the past two years, I’ve come to see it as a very beautiful thing. By asking the porcelain painters of Jingdezhen to help with this project, Ai has given autonomy to hundreds of workers who’d otherwise remain anonymous in China’s export economy – their names masked by the ubiquitous “Made in China” label. Each of the sunflower seeds, though similar in its general characteristics, is unique in its own pattern. The Jingdezhen artisans were trying to create similar seeds, but because each cornel is hand-painted, myriad differences in pattern distinguish them. Similarly, although China’s huge porcelain industry doesn’t allow its workers personal expression, each of the artisans is unique and special and talented, and Ai Weiwei is encouraging everyone to remember this. I can’t think of another contemporary studio artist who celebrates the machine world with such empathy, which is heartening in a socioeconomic cycle that increasingly celebrates the immediate.

(Image credit: tate.org.uk)

And so over the course of this past summer I anxiously awaited news of Ai’s tax evasion case. Back in April 2011 he was arrested at Beijing Airport just before boarding a flight to Hong Kong on vague charges. Every newspaper account of the arrest provides its own array of reasons for the detention, but at a certain point it's plainly obvious that the Chinese authorities simply felt threatened by the free-speaking artist. Their anxiety boiled over in the wake of the Arab Spring. They released Ai after several months in detention and slapped him with a 12 million yuan ($1.85 million) tax bill, although it’s impossible to know the veracity of this alleged malfeasance. Additionally, Ai was instructed to remain in Beijing for a year and refrain from posting on his Twitter account (he'd previously been an avid tweeter). A few months after all of this, Ai was tweeting again. As he has said, “Never retreat, retweet.” Ai’s appeal of his tax evasion case was rejected in court a few weeks ago, on July 20^th.

It strikes me that many Americans are unfamiliar with Ai Weiwei’s art. Well, at least those I’ve asked claim they are. Everyone who tuned into the 2008 Summer Olympics has seen some of Ai’s work: he was the artistic consultant for the great Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron when they designed the Beijing National Stadium. (Ai distanced himself from the project after helping to design the stadium, declaiming the way the Communist Party started using the Olympics as a piece or propaganda.) But the rest of Ai’s work is known to a relative few in the states, and this is unfortunate. Although the artist is often riffing on the oppression he feels in China, almost everything he creates encourages one to think about fundamental human rights and our tendency not to question the institutions we appreciate. Through Ai’s work on the Sichuan earthquake, for example, not only does one feel for the many who needlessly lost their lives in the poorly constructed public buildings, but we’re also compelled to question a political elite who’d cynically view such disaster as opportunity. In this hectic political season, no matter one’s persuasion, it might be worthwhile to meditate on Ai’s commentary about propaganda and institutional mandates. Perhaps the best any of us can do in such a complicated system is retweet, and understand that some of us won't be able to resist picking up a handful of sunflower seeds.