Art review: Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei poses with paintings from his "Who Am I?" art exhibition — Ai will use "almost anything as a medium for making a point"

(Image credit: Roberto Serra - Iguana Press / Getty Images)

"Ai Weiwei's work thinks big: big politics, big history, big issues, big materials," said Charles Mudede in The Stranger. So it's fitting that the first U.S. exhibition of Ai's art in more than a decade is also the biggest yet. More than 130 of the Chinese artist-activist's works are on display at the Seattle Art Museum sites and two satellite locations, and it's impossible to view them without considering the 67-year-old's long battle against all forms of contemporary authoritarianism and the Chinese state's brutal response. Since Ai was arrested and beaten in 2009, then jailed again under suspect justifications in 2011, he has continued creating and, as always, he "remixes our globalized culture," combining the materials of mass production, motifs from art history, and personal emotional responses to challenge power structures and how we view them.

Ai will use "almost anything as a medium for making a point," said Michael Janofsky in The New York Times. For 2009's Snake Ceiling, he famously hung 857 green-and-white backpacks in a serpentine overhead configuration to commemorate the thousands of schoolchildren killed in a 2008 Sichuan province earthquake, though the state failed to count them. Also here is a 1-ton pile of the hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds that he had artisans create as a way to push back against depersonalization. Recently, Lego bricks have become a favored Ai medium. Appearing at the Seattle Asian Art Museum is Ai's larger-than-life 2022 Lego reproduction of Claude Monet's famous Water Lilies #1. In the main exhibit stands his massive Lego reproduction of the first page of Robert Mueller's report on Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. From a distance of a few steps, "it's an easy-to-read pixelated facsimile." Move closer and the image becomes illegible, suggesting "the fragility of democracy."

As an example of art's power to upend political realities, however, a work like that "borders on farce," said Louis Bury in Art in America. Ai, who currently lives as an exile in Europe, seems to have concluded that bearing witness to government malfeasance is necessary but insufficient. Visitors to this show are greeted by his huge 2020 neon sign that spells out a four-letter expletive that starts with F. Nearby is a bronze arm with its middle finger extended, and the message is a mix of defiance and embittered resignation. More agonizing is 81, Ai's re-creation of the solitary confinement chamber where he spent 81 days under arrest in 2011. "Standing inside the sculpture feels like being a rat plopped down in a maze, and grasping that you have limited control over your fate." Though the curators probably intend for viewers to leave the show inspired to fight oppression, "that sense of curtailed agency forms the retrospective's heart of darkness."