A huge wallpaper covering welcomes us while we are queuing at the ticket office or peeking into the bookshop of Palazzo Fava. It covers all the walls and among the many figures reproduced in series on the surface, a llama that is actually an alpaca stands out. “The Animal That Looks Like a Lama but is Really an Alpaca” (2023) is the site-specific work that introduces Ai Weiwei, exhibited for the first time in Bologna. But, if you look very carefully, many street (and social) control cameras are depicted that have long since become part of the unwanted stylistic figures of the Chinese artist.

Ai Weiwei during the installation of his solo exhibition “Who am I?” at Palazzo Fava, photo Roberto Serra, courtesy Genus Bononiae. Musei della Città
The wallpaper is the first of over fifty works that make up “Ai Weiwei. Who am I?”, the anthological exhibition on the Beijing artist impeccably curated by Arturo Galansino, which is also a journey through his battles for rights, his resistance to the omnipotent Chinese government presence, his thousand shades of artist, sociologist, witness, reporter, thanks to a very engaging path made of installations, sculptures, videos and photographs that testify to his versatile mastery of art, signs, technique, materials. Very recent is also the site-specific homage to a historic Bolognese artist like Giorgio Morandi: “Still Life (after Giorgio Morandi)”, from 2024, is the first work in Lego bricks on display, in a niche in front of the monumental staircase that leads to the first floor. In the rippled surface (but, as we move away, it becomes increasingly smoother) the typical Morandi normality is clearly recognizable and we find ourselves faced with an aesthetic taste of Weiwei’s compositional ability.

Ai Weiwei, “Who am I?”, installation view at Palazzo Fava, photo Elettra Bastoni, courtesy Genus Bononiae. Musei della Città
Ascending the Renaissance staircase, it is a good idea for the visitors to keep their gaze skyward: their head is surmounted by “Feiyu” (2015), the first in a series of flying kite sculptures in bamboo and silk, depicting light and mythical winged figures illuminated from within and inspired by an ancient Chinese bestiary. After just three works, Ai Weiwei’s versatility is revealed in all its strength: wallpaper, Lego bricks and bamboo with silk are the everyday and familiar materials that tell the story of the multitude of techniques that inhabit the artist’s atelier.

Ai Weiwei, “Who am I?”, installation view at Palazzo Fava, photo Elettra Bastoni, courtesy Genus Bononiae. Musei della Città
The Stories of Jason and Medea are the theme of a frieze frescoed by Annibale, Agostino and Ludovico Carracci on the first floor. In front of the visitor to the exhibition, Ai Weiwei launches his chromatic and visual power with the gigantic wall works that reproduce, in Lego bricks, some great Italian Renaissance works, with the addition or modification of a detail with a very strong symbolic value. From right to left, “Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia (After Raphael)”, “Atalanta and Hippomenes (After Guido Reni)”, both from 2024, “The Last Supper” (with Ai Weiwei mockingly in the role of Judas) and “Sleeping Venus with Coat Hanger”, (with a coat hanger to symbolize the plague of clandestine abortions) from 2022. Although one of the principles of enjoying contemporary art (which substantially differentiates it from the enjoyment of classical art) is interaction (while ecstasy belongs to more historicized art), in front of Ai Weiwei’s 342 cm (height) by 684 cm (base) (that is, two thirds of the dimensions of Leonardo’s original masterpiece), you experience both sensations, such is the enormous play of colors and spatial manual skill that overwhelms the observer. Applying a mental mathematical calculation, one can hypothesize the presence of several tens of thousands of Lego pieces that, with the different and necessary nuances, fit together and are placed side by side to revisit a well-known scenario (such as Leonardo’s “The Last Supper”), re-proposed here in a truly luminous pop key and the center of an artistic cyclone that questions us on the reproducibility of classical art (Ai Weiwei was in New York when he was young). The Carracci room is completed by the presence of another work, also gigantic: “Left Right Studio Material” is an enormous carpet of shattered porcelain, the theme of fragility and the disintegration of tradition, caused by modernity, which we will find again in the exhibition.

Ai Weiwei, “Who am I?”, installation view at Palazzo Fava, photo Roberto Serra, courtesy Genus Bononiae. Musei della Città
A large photographic triptych occupies the Hall of Grotesques (and this placement is not accidental). In the first photograph, Ai Weiwei holds a Han vase/urn, the dynastic era in which Confucianism became the official state philosophy (with Ai Weiwei one must always be careful of historical references that underlie political landslides imperceptible to the Western eye); in the second, the object, now freed from the artist’s hands, is in free fall; in the third it is shattered on the ground (on a small scale, like the porcelain carpet in the previous room). The triptych, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn” (1995), is in black and white and behind Weiwei there is a disturbing concrete wall: tradition dies and history can thus be rewritten.

Ai Weiwei, “Who am I?”, installation view at Palazzo Fava, photo Elettra Bastoni, courtesy Genus Bononiae. Musei della Città
In Enea Hall frescoed by Carracci there is a sort of anthological miscellany of Ai Weiwei’s artistic creativity, with works completely different from each other in terms of materials and symbolism. We point out the return of the Han era vase, with the Coca-Cola brand in evidence, which invites us to reflect on the distortions that arise when the two cultures, Eastern and Western, intersect (“Han Dynasty Urn with Coca Cola”, 1995). Or the “Therese Dreaming” from 2024, in which the artist re-proposes with the brick the original sensual work by Balthus, adding, as it is his style, the vase just described with the logo of the drink in sight. And again, under display, the 2005 reproduction in greenish porcelain of the famous Kanagawa, “The Great Wave” by Katsushika Hokusai, also the subject (not on display) of a work in Lego.

Ai Weiwei, “Who am I?”, installation view at Palazzo Fava, photo Roberto Serra, courtesy Genus Bononiae. Musei della Città
In the smaller Enea Hall by Bartolomeo Cesi, there is a single gigantic melting pot of golden bicycles. “Forever. Stainless Steel Bicycles in Gilding” from 2013 is an installation composed of six layers of bicycles in brilliant golden stainless steel. The work is an artistic tribute that recalls the most famous and vintage Chinese bicycle manufacturing company, Forever, and the bicycle is a great classic of the Chinese urban landscape, now prey to an astonishing and dizzying real estate and technological growth that makes them an object of tradition and a ready-made for Weiwei’s imagination. In the Enea Hall, also attributable to the Carracci, Ai Weiwei proposes a gallery that combines antiquity with modernity, the grotesque with challenge. “White Stone Axes”, 450 Neolithic stone tools laid out on the floor (a work conceived over almost a decade, from 1993 to 2000), are surmounted on the wall by a new work in Lego bricks depicting two teacups. The contrast between the two works reminds us of what civilization has produced in its evolution and the conceptual boundary between the two works is broken by the bold photograph of a woman who, lifting her skirt, shows her panties. The boldness of this black and white photo (with the very light title, “June 1994”) lies in the place where it is portrayed, the Mausoleum of Mao Tse-tung, a highly symbolic monument on the edge of the sacred and certainly very political in modern China.

Ai Weiwei, “Who am I?”, installation view at Palazzo Fava, photo Roberto Serra, courtesy Genus Bononiae. Musei della Città
The next room, also dedicated to the Virgilian hero, reinforces the artistic contamination of the previous one: there is a “Mona Lisa Smeared in Cream” (2024), depicted both with the pictorial technique and with Lego bricks, which shows us the famous Leonardian diva with the part of her belly, the one on which she crosses her arms, almost erased by the patina of cream that the Chinese artist intended to add by simulating an eco-activist action, under the quadruple gaze of a classic Warhol style that depicts himself with the bricks and his face reproduced four times (“Ai Weiwei Quadruplex”, 2023) and under the hieratic and Buddhist (but brainless) gaze of a small glass sculpture (“Brainless Figure in Glass”, 2022) that depicts him almost confusing the observer on the identity of the sculpted subject (halfway between Mao and Buddha) and to underline our fragilities through the material used.

Ai Weiwei, “Who am I?”, installation view at Palazzo Fava, photo Roberto Serra, courtesy Genus Bononiae. Musei della Città
A new and magnificent flying kite sculpture in bamboo and silk accompanies us to the upper floor, dedicated almost entirely to the artist in his socio-political activism. Refugees, detention camps, a sort of long march of the desperate, war, government surveillance cameras, borders with fences, the figure of Alan Kurdi, Hokusai’s wave that overwhelms migrants: there are many themes and events reported on a new, gigantic wallpaper that seems to envelop the corridor of the second floor. A photographic project comes to meet us with a real middle finger (that of Ai Weiwei) of contempt, re-proposed in front of famous places in world capitals: it is the thematic series “The study of perspective” (gestation almost twenty years from 1997 to 2015), mocking title of a sequence that shows us, starting from Tiananmen Square, places and monuments that are symbols of power throughout human history (it is in fact the same gesture of irreverence by Maurizio Cattelan and visible in front of the Stock Exchange building in Milan, a work from 2010).

Ai Weiwei, “Who am I?”, installation view at Palazzo Fava, photo Roberto Serra, courtesy Genus Bononiae. Musei della Città
Ai Weiwei’s activism explodes, putting his face, body, presence, voice and soul into it, in the final and very rich photographic and video section. It is impossible to enumerate everything that falls under the photographic and cinematographic gaze in these rooms: and, more than words, sometimes necessarily robust, the sense of oppression is palpable, sometimes evident sometimes more sophisticated, that the Chinese government has been implementing on the artist’s daily life for decades. «That is the only cat, among the dozens of cats in this house, that manages to open the exit door», says the artist in a video that is both an interview and a documentation of his relationship with the authorities. It is an obvious metaphor of the individual who, despite the resignation of others, manages to open a passage in the middle of the wall erected in front of his own life. “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” is the title of the documentary by American director Alison Klayman (2012, 90’), which follows the Chinese artist on his long journey of opposition that saw him witness the demolition of his own studio in Shanghai, in prison for 81 days, in opposition to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, at the forefront in collecting testimonies and documents kept quiet by the authorities, on the occasion of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, as always downplayed in its tragic numbers by the authorities.

Ai Weiwei, “Who am I?”, installation view at Palazzo Fava, photo Roberto Serra, courtesy Genus Bononiae. Musei della Città
The visitor is left with a great deal of this exceptional promenade in the heart of Ai Weiwei’s human, creative, artistic impulse: a bit like walking barefoot in the majestic carpet of one hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds hand-made by a thousand artisans from the city of Jingdezhen, the capital of this type of workmanship, who risk losing their jobs due to the forced and rapid modernization imposed by the central authorities. That work was on display, as a site-specific installation, at the Tate Modern in London in 2011. The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue published by Sillabe Editore.
Info:
Ai Weiwei. Who am I?
21/09/2024 – 4/05/2025
Palazzo Fava
Via Manzoni, 2 – Bologna
www.genusbononiae.it

I am Giovanni Crotti and I was born in June 1968 in Reggio Calabria to be reborn in June 2014 in Piacenza, the city where I live. My income is guaranteed by digital consultancy, and I then spend it largely on art and letterature: I have been and am a content curator and organizer of cultural events for artists, galleries and institutional spaces, as well as a writer of exhibition reviews, creatives of every era and books.
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