modern

art asia issue five: november, 2010

editor’s review KRISTINA KLEUTGHEN

Ai Weiwei 艾未未, Sunflower Seeds (2010)
Unilever Installation, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, 12 October 2010 – 2 May 2011.


From above, Sunflower Seeds appears as a flatly textured mass of grey, slightly bluer than
the hard, flat walls of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Up close, the undifferentiated mass of grey
sharpens into an infinite expanse of sunflower seeds: 1500 metric tons of porcelain covering 1000
square meters of floors space to a depth of ten centimeters, amounting originally to more than 100
million ceramic seeds. Each seed was molded, individually hand-painted, fired, and polished in a
classical porcelain-making process of some thirty individual steps carried out by 1600 workers of all
ages in the ancient “Porcelain City” of Jingdezhen. Sunflower Seeds represents a scale of production
and presentation that Ai has been increasingly experimenting with over recent years, such as with
Fairytale (2007) at Dokumenta and So Sorry (2009) in Munich. But the scale of Sunflower Seeds
trumps anything he has produced before.

A fifteen-minute film on the seeds’ production reveals that, from start to finish, human hands
power the entire process. The seeds’ painters are primarily women: when asked how may seeds
he himself painted, Ai responded, “Three or four…” and lamented the quality of his own painting.
The conception and design are Ai’s; but the labor belongs to the nameless artists and artisans of
Jingdezhen who actually produced the millions of objects. Jingdezhen has a porcelain production
history that spans well over a millennium, and its products were often destined for the imperial court.
This contrast between porcelain as a fine art fit for emperors, and the humble form of the ubiquitous
sunflower seed spat, crushed and empty, onto every street in China is sharpened by the recent
record-setting sale at Sotheby’s Hong
Kong of an eighteenth-century imperial
porcelain vase for $32.4million. Ai
frequently engages both the practical
and conceptual idea of cultural relics
(wenwu 文物) in his work, from
dissecting classical furniture to smashing
or repainting ancient pottery. Do the
sunflower seeds therefore subvert the
idea of the cultural relic? Or do they
expand it into the present of Chinese
contemporary art, and the future that
will soon enough become (Chinese) art
history?

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art asia issue five, november 2010

The choice of Ai Weiwei marks the first time that a Chinese artist – or even an Asian artist –
has been given the Unilever commission for the Turbine Hall.1 Does Ai continue to be beloved by the
West more for his political leanings, for his art, or for the fact that these two things are inseparable?
As political and politicized an artist as Ai has become with regard to contemporary causes like the
2008 Sichuan earthquake and political dissidence, the sunflower seeds hearken back to Ai’s youth
during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). At the time, popular imagery depicted Mao Zedong as
the sun and the masses as sunflowers angling their heads perpetually toward him. Ai remembers
that sunflower seeds “supported the whole revolution” as an object available for generous sharing
even among the poorest people, a gesture of connection and compassion during even the bleakest
times. It is surprising to realize that Mao did not make more use of this quotidian edible available to
even the humblest of his citizens. But it is also a sentimental notion that lacks the usual bite of Ai’s
social justice activism, and romanticizes a harsh period in China’s recent history that Westerners find
particularly fascinating.

A more interesting metaphor inherent in the seeds lies in the sheer scale of the installation,
which recalls both China’s booming population and the global power of its myriad netizens – a
power seemingly made stronger by working en masse rather than individually. This connection to
the present day and the power of the mass public conveyed through technology and the internet is
emphasized in a special interactive feature accompanying Sunflower Seeds. Eight camera and video
monitors allow visitors to record themselves asking a question that is later posted on a dedicated
website, aiweiwei.tate.org.uk, for Ai to answer. The camera-shy can interact with the artist and the
installation through Ai’s near-constant Twitter feed and by marking any such tweets with a special
hashtag (#tateaww). Ai’s near-obsession with Twitter is well known, exemplified by the tweets sent
from his hospital bed after undergoing cranial surgery for a brain hemorrhage. Ai’s fascination with
the public’s ability to influence world happenings over the internet, which is metaphorized by the
seeds, is also mirrored in the audience’s rare direct (if digital) contact with the artist through this
special feature that is as much a part of the installation as the seeds themselves.

The installation succeeds through its interactivity, which Ai Weiwei intended to be with both
the art and the artist. But the formal sensory experience of the seeds is no longer possible: only
a few days after Sunflower Seeds opened, health concerns raised by the clouds of ceramic dust
generated by visitors romping through the thousand square meters of the installation led the Tate
Modern to close off the seeds from public access. Visitors can now only view Sunflower Seeds from a
distance, although seeds have been set out for visitors to touch in a weak imitation of the intended
experience. Some have noted how this connection to the respiratory problems suffered by ceramics
workers and others in heavy industry expanded the metaphors inherent in the installation.2 But
the seeds were also suffering under the physical presence of the public, whose weight and friction
rubbed the black slip off the unglazed porcelain, and whose desire to possess the seeds soon found
samples for sale on both eBay and its Chinese counterpart Taobao 淘宝. Environmental and public

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art asia issue five, november 2010

safety concerns, damage to and theft of works of art, and the dangerous power that the public can
wield as an entity – Sunflower Seeds has perhaps become more of a metaphor than even Ai Weiwei
intended.

Notes

1 Anish Kapoor, whose Marsyas was installed in the Turbine Hall from 9 October 2002 to 6 April
2003, identifies as a British artist although he is Indian by birth.

2 Evan Osnos, “Letter from China: Ai Weiwei’s Exhibit at the Tate – Off Limits,” The New Yorker
online, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2010/10/ai-weiwei-tate-off-limits.
html, accessed 15 October 2010; Ulara Nakagawa, “From Seeds to Dust,” The Diplomat, http://the-
diplomat.com/new-emissary/2010/10/18/from-seeds-to-dust/, accessed 18 October 2010.

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