Considered one of Ai’s most well-known items, a collection of pictures titled Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn(1995), depicts the artist apparently destroying a 2,000-year-old artifact. The photographs solidified Ai because the prolific iconoclast we all know at the moment. “As a part of humanity, artists assemble and deconstruct to create new definitions, continually scrutinizing and evaluating our worth system and the probabilities of our existence,” Ai tells BBC Tradition. “That is how I all the time method issues, by standing on the alternative facet of the problem, and even the alternative facet of myself. I consider this measure is probably the most reliable one.”
How have your private experiences knowledgeable your work?
To place it merely, the whole lot I’ve executed previously, what I’m doing now, and what I’ll do sooner or later is all directed in direction of one query: “who am I?” It’s normal data that our understanding of ourselves is carefully tied to our life experiences, recollections, and the way we reply to on a regular basis conditions. This could be a wrestle since our self-perception just isn’t one thing that may be simply indifferent from actuality and recollections.
It was relatively late once I totally realized this. For over 50 years earlier than 2011, I used to be very confused. On 3 April 2011, I used to be secretly detained. It was an important second for me as a result of this expertise compelled me to re-evaluate my state of affairs, the place I got here from, and who I really was. After 81 days of secret detention, I used to be surprisingly launched. It was then that I spotted I wanted to know what occurred previously, why my father, a poet, was exiled, and the way my time with him had influenced me.