The Tate Modern is the natural gallery in London to show ground-breaking, avant garde artworks. The kind that as often as not might make you shrug, dismiss, and despair of.
I am talking about bricks laid out on the floor so that their only distinctive feature is the ease with which one can trip over them. Or rubber tyres in the shaped of a half-submerged submarine.
On the plus side, I remember some years ago liking a grand piano that was suspended from the ceiling and which repeatedly dropped ten feet while spilling its innards before winding itself up to the ceiling again.
These are personal opinions of course, and you may feel differently. And if not you, then someone else may love the bricks or the tyres. The only constants are that to each his own, and that there is no accounting for taste.
So when I read about Ai Weiwei’s exhibition, Sunflower Seeds, I was spectacularly unimpressed and uninterested.
I had read that Ai Weiwei was considered to be a dissident in China, but beyond that I knew very little about him.
Why We Went To The Tate Modern
The Sunflower Seeds mass sculpture was an afterthought. We drifted towards it after seeing the Gauguin exhibition.
We went to the Tate Modern specifically to see the Gauguin exhibition. It was a major exhibition with paintings from all period’s of the artist’s life. It was a huge and spectacular exhibition and we saw many paintings from all periods of his life. We also learned a lot about Gauguin’s perspective on life and the troubled times to which that led him.
The Sunflower Seeds Exhibition
But of course, this article is not about Gauguin but about Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds exhibition.
As I said, we drifted towards it at the end of a long afternoon, out of curiosity over the sheer size of it.
The mass sculpture that comprises the exhibition is laid out on the floor of the Turbine Hall and covers about one half of the hall.
The one hundred million sunflower seeds that comprise the exhibition trail off into the distance.
To give you a sense of the huge size of the Turbine Hall, take a look at the photograph at the head of this article. Can you see the doorway in the left corner down at the far end?
They dwarf the attendants walking along the narrow walkway that leads to the administrative offices at the far end of the Turbine Hall.
Dust and Health & Safety
I had read that the curators at the Tate Modern had had to fence off the seeds to prevent people walking across them.
The original idea was that visitors would crunch their way through the seeds, but the dust they were throwing up was considered dangerous to health.
The reason for that is that the seeds are not real sunflower seeds.
They are individually crafted, life-sized porcelain sunflower seed husks.
Each of the 100 million seeds that make up the exhibition were made by hand in Jingdezhen in China- a city that has long been associated with pottery production. The video that accompanies the exhibition shows dozens and dozens of people in the city employed in making the seeds – a laudable undertaking.
The seeds were mass-produced in the sense that little balls of clay were individually put into tray moulds and fired in a hug kiln. Then each seed was cleaned and hand-painted, stripe by stripe.
The Idea Behind the Sculpture
So what is the idea behind this mass sculpture? According to Ai WeiWei it is about several things. It is about ‘made in China’ and the politics of a culture that turns individuals into mass producers.
Ai Weiwei comes across as a very sympathetic person in the video, and as we stood in the huge Turbine hall looking at the sea of seeds, we started to be drawn into what we were seeing.
So in contrast to the pile of bricks of earlier exhibitions, we liked this one.
Each seed is attractive; each is different. But from a distance they are very nearly the same.
It left us feeling part of the caring family of man.
Ai Weiwei
By chance after I had written this article, but before publishing it, I saw a programme on TV where Alan Yantob interviewed Ai Weiwei.
Alan Yentob had been refused a visa to enter China, so the interview was conducted by video from their respective computers half a world apart.
I came in partway through the programme at the point at which Ai Weiwei was describing how the Chinese authorities had placed a security camera across the street from his house in Beijing so that they could monitor his comings and goings.
In response, Ai Weiwei had sculpted a number of marble security cameras, and it was particularly amusing to see them lined up on a bench – iconic and unseeing.