Ai Weiwei: What You See Is What You See and Child’s Play

I met Ai Weiwei in the summer of 2008 in Beijing. He didn’t really talk to me—he talked to the two younger Chinese curators with me (in Chinese, which I unfortunately don’t speak). Afterwards, one of them told me that he’d said critical and courageous things about the Chinese political system that she’d always thought but was afraid to say or think. At the end of the conversation I asked why he didn’t just leave if he felt it was so bad in China, and he snapped “where am I supposed to go, the moon?” In retrospect, perhaps he was making a point about the fact that everywhere else was embracing China’s brand of Capitalist-based-fascism, of which we have become well aware. The works in this pair of exhibitions, almost all Lego (or Woma, Chinese Lego), are manipulations of classic paintings and photographs, at times overtly call out the United States morphing towards oligarco-fascism, such as Last U.S. Soldier Leaving Afghanistan (2022) or Truth (2023) a portrait of antihero Julian Assange. But it also appears more colorfully in Washington Crossing the Delaware (2023), a recreation of Leutze’s 1851 historic painting, where Ai has placed the Bird’s Nest stadium he designed with Herzog & de Meuron—and consequently disavowed—in the far left corner. I initially read this as a cautionary allegory of the United States approaching a Chinese form of government. It then became apparent that Ai placed bits of himself in almost all the pictures, like the structure of his new home/studio in Portugal in the corner of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (2023) or his Coca-Cola painted vase in Balthus’s Thérese Dreaming (2024), so it might also just be a form of self-portraiture. In our conversation I asked him where he got off re-painting Neolithic vases, and he claimed he was making them better. When I asked if he was ok with someone in the future painting over his work he quipped that it would be fine, as long as they made them better—but they were already the best.