Exhibits of the week: Ai Weiwei's Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads and Fragments

Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads is at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., through Feb. 24, 2013.

Fragments is at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C., through April 7, 2013.

“If your concept of Chinese art is delicately painted screens and fragile porcelain cups, prepare for your world to be upended,” said Tish Wells in The Miami Herald. Two works by Ai Weiwei, which recently went on display in Washington, offer U.S. audiences an opportunity to get better acquainted with the work of the renowned Chinese dissident before the Hirshhorn mounts a major retrospective this fall. For Fragments (2005), located in the Smithsonian’s Sackler museum, Ai took ancient ironwood beams salvaged from demolished temples and assembled them in a room-size configuration that “makes the heavy wood almost dance.” Nearby, in the Hirshhorn’s sculpture garden, his Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2010) tops a dozen 10-foot-high posts with the grinning bronze heads of a rooster, a rat, and the other animals of the Chinese zodiac. Neither installation appears overtly political, or non-Western. But layers of meaning emerge with just a little knowledge about context.

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Even if the context eludes you, “there are two easy access points to Ai’s work,” said Kriston Capps in the Washington City Paper. One is the works’ austerity: Fragments is a great piece of architecture, and its precision joinery “is surely any carpenter’s dream.” Humor is Ai’s other icebreaker—as with his decision to include of a pair of “Siamese” stools, conjoined at one leg. The zodiac heads are practically cartoons, though for a good reason. On one hand, Ai has re-created a European-made 18th-century set of zodiac figures that were built for a Chinese palace garden but stolen or destroyed by British and French forces during the Second Opium War. On the other hand, he can’t resist needling Chinese officials who are upset that some of the originals have recently turned up at auction. By creating a somewhat goofy new zodiac and making it available to the public, he’s “thumbing his nose at the people who would take official symbols too seriously, or keep them for themselves.”

No viewer will completely succeed in pinning Ai down, said Anne Midgette in The Washington Post. A mere two works by an artist so prolific can only convey so much, after all. What’s more, Ai may aim his darts at big targets—like his repressive government or the mindlessness of capitalism—but he’s not telling viewers exactly what to think. Fragments doesn’t feel like a manifesto. “Indeed, it feels like a playhouse.” This is an artist who’s deliberately playful and “offhandedly thoughtful.” He’s “happy to pose questions and let others think through to the answers.”