Dissident artist Ai Weiwei has long known the power of branding. The iconoclast who once dropped a Han dynasty urn as a political act has also painted these priceless artifacts with the Coca-Cola logo.
In the art world, these are shocking, outrageous acts. But are they any more outrageous than the corporate and state destruction of a people and a nation? With his latest installation, Trace, which was previously installed at Alcatraz, Ai again makes a political statement, shaping portraits of 176 political prisoners from Lego blocks.
These portraits are of people like Do Thi Minh Han, a member of an advocacy group in Vietnam that stood up for victims of land confiscation, and was sentenced to seven years in prison. And the Tibetan singer known as Lolo, arrested in 2012 after releasing an album that called for Tibetan independence.
Trace is certainly connected to Ai’s own troubles as political artist. After Chinese authorities confiscated his passport, Ai was unable to attend the Hirshhorn’s 2012 survey of his work, and at various times was kept under house arrest and detained for months on charges of tax evasion.
But however politically awakened he is, Ai has also proven himself to be a comedian, and it would be too easy to suggest that Trace is all superficial politics. While he claims the inspiration for using Legos came from his five-year old son, the artist, with his branded Han dynasty urns, has a history of scathing commentary on the commodification of art.
With portraits of dissidents taken from pixelated images found on the internet, and made of material best known as children’s playthings, Ai suggests that we have reduced these dissidents’ troubles to pixelated memes that barely scratch the surface of their causes—causes that landed them in prison. Politics, like art, has become all too easy to wear on your sleeve, no deeper than the fraction of an inch of a Lego block.
Moving this installation from Alcatraz, a former prison, to a museum, seems an indictment of the art world as well. Do cultural institutions merely trap art in amber, sentencing ideas to mere display—and worse, selfies?
This commodification of art seems typified by the one piece in this show commissioned specifically for the Hirshhorn: The Plain Version of the Animal That Looks Like a Llama but Is Really an Alpaca is simply a variation of the 2015 piece of the same name, but without color. It’s wallpaper, with the gold-colored version happily represented on socks and trinkets you can buy in the gift shop.
Which is as much as a part of the exhibit as the installations. Under the real guise of political oppression, Ai, the great political satirist, is gracing the Hirshhorn with toys, wallpaper, and branded design.
It’s provocative, and hilarious.
Ai Weiwei: Trace at Hirshhorn is on display from June 28, 2018 through January 1, 2018 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The artist will be delivering the James T. Demetrion Lecture at the museum tonight at 6:30 p.m., but free tickets have already been distributed.
