Read, Watch, and Listen

Sunflower Seeds

In the process of crafting millions of porcelain sunflower seeds, Chinese artist Ai WeiWei creates a work of art as well as a positive social project for the village in rural China he employed to make the seeds. Follow Sunflower Seeds on its remarkable journey from conception to delivery, and hear the artist talk about his unique socio-political approach to making art.

Bang

Ai Weiwei has assembled 886 three-legged wooden stools. In today’s China, the three-legged stool is an antique. Manufactured by a uniform method, it was in use throughout China and all sectors of society for centuries. Every family had at least one stool, which served all sorts of domestic purposes and was passed on from generation to generation.

After the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, and the subsequent modernisation of the country, however, production of these stools plummeted. Aluminium and plastic have superseded wood as the standard material for furniture. Out of 886 of these stereotyped and yet highly individual objects, Ai Weiwei, recruiting traditional craftsmen who possess the necessary and now rare expertise has created an expansive, rhizomatic structure whose sprawling growth recalls the rampantly proliferating organisms of this world’s megacities.