A collection of works selected by Ai Weiwei that traces the artist's career, in tribute to his father, the poet Ai Qing, and the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren.
The lives of Ai Qing (1910-1996) and Ai Weiwei (b. 1957), father and son respectively, together span more than a century of history in China and the West. Their lives were shaped by historical events, political realities, family circumstances, and, above all, artistic encounters.
For Ai Qing, this was the work of Emile Verhaeren, whom he came to know in Paris and whose poetry he was the first to translate into Chinese. For Ai Weiwei, it was his encounter in New York with the work and ideas of
Marcel Duchamp and
Andy Warhol, which he introduced to the Chinese avant-garde of the 1990s.
Life, Revolt, Poetry traces the artistic journeys of father and son. The book unfolds as two parallel stories marked by striking similarities. Both artists came into conflict with the Chinese authorities: Ai Qing and Ai Weiwei were imprisoned and exiled. For Ai Weiwei, both this book and the exhibition are a tribute to his father and to Emile Verhaeren.
Ai Weiwei's daily concerns and experiences with China's cultural and historical space of reference and today's political and social developments in his homeland constitute key elements of this work. He attempts to reach the very essence of China's traditional cultural production. By appropriating and changing the historically shaped cultural languages and their forms and contents, Ai Weiwei often consciously destroys and reconstructs them–thus expanding the contemporary contexts in which the cultural and aesthetic use of materials and meanings are constituted. His most recent wood and porcelain series is about a new understanding of traditional cultural forms and aesthetic processes.
