The first solo exhibition in India of the renowned Chinese conceptual artist Ai Weiwei at the Nature Morte gallery in Delhi presents a limited number of works that explore the diverse saturations and introspection of the artist’s three-decade-long art practice. Ai Weiwei, as we know, is the most celebrated and eminent for his giant installations, material playfulness, his crossing of media and boundaries, and his attention to art-historical, philosophical, and conceptual concerns.
In India’s first solo of WeiWei, Nature Morte presents a constellation of recently occupied projects that encompass ideas such as material evidence, cultural memory and the politics of images. The exhibition, which started on January 15, will end on February 22. The show includes ceramics, Terracotta, Clothing, toy brickwork, which fall within the genres of painting but also question the very medium itself, drawn from Ai Weiwei’s broader fields of artistic practice, including sculpture, installation, film, photography, ceramics, painting, writing, and social media. The exhibition also brings together works that move between the ancient and the contemporary: Stone Axes painted white (with Neolithic stone axes), Porcelain pillar with refugee motif (addressing migration), and new works including F.U.C.K. (mad in buttons on jute) and whitewashed remnants of the history of the state of emergency, future works.
This exhibition brings together a focused selection of works across media, including Ai Weiwei’s large-scale toy-brick compositions, Surging (after Hokusai), Water Lilies, Monalisa, Jackson Pollock, and work that reflects his long-standing quest across media. A special feature of this exhibition is its tribute to many classic paintings, and seeing them reinterpreted with materials like toy bricks is a fantastic experience. Ai Weiwei’s ‘Pollock in Blue’ is a tribute to Jackson Pollock and is highly commendable. Another special aspect is the material used. Here, Ai Weiwei establishes that toy bricks are not just a material for children’s play; they also reveal how much material transactions occur within cultural contexts. There is a wide range of materials in this exhibition as well, from iron, wood, and porcelain to buttons and toy bricks – they become a language for thinking about time, labour, inheritance, and power.
Ai Weiwei says in the introduction to the show, ‘This is my first exhibition in India. Although there are only a dozen of my artworks, they cover several key points that trace more than 20 years—and almost 30 years—of my creative activity.’ This show allows viewers to see the journey of an artist shaped over time and through various materials. The ‘Toy-Bricks’ painting titled Water Lilies was displayed at the Delhi Art Fair. The remaining works are in India for the first time. Experiencing the works of an artist like Ai Weiwei in person is an experience in itself, which is what the Nature Morte gallery provides.
The tagline ‘from the oldest to the newest’ perfectly suits this exhibition. From Neolithic stone axes to ‘toy bricks,’ there is a world of materials, a world of diversity created by the world itself. It is for this reason that Ai Weiwei engages in interventions in his era and in art history. Here, the material ‘toy bricks’ is used to integrate artworks such as the Mona Lisa, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Hokusai’s classic paintings, Claude Monet’s water lilies, and tributes to Pollock’s Blue into the art world.
In Aparajita Jain’s statement as Co-director, Nature Morte, “Bringing Ai’s works to India isn’t about creating a spectacle—for us, it is about urgency. His work speaks to the present moment with total clarity: history, borders, memory. India is a place where these questions are lived, not abstract, and this exhibition invites that conversation without flinching. It is made clear what the relevance of AI’s works is in contemporary India.
Ai Weiwei is an artist with a long history of being at the forefront of protests against authority. F.U.C.K., a word that has emerged from these protests and often identifies the artist himself as a statement against the system, finds a new expression in this exhibition. No matter how strongly it is said, F.U.C.K must be expressed against the system, and that is evident here. Working against the establishments is the artist’s mission. Establishments don’t mean only the government; they can even be a trivial law or a social condition. Moves against many such entities can be hidden in a small art piece by the artist. That is what can be seen here.
Revisits to the paintings made with toy bricks reestablish classic works in a contemporary context. As is evident, art is a continuous history. Making a space for oneself in it involves creating by reinterpreting and revisiting old, classic works. Here, you can see a pop art version of both the revisit and the reinterpretation of the classics. Ai Weiwei brings Claude Monet’s Water Lilies into contact with his own Water Lilies on the canvas. That is, this work is also an adornment of another work. At the place of the Water Lilies, its interpretation in toy bricks also stands. It is as if Claude Monet and Ai Weiwei are standing together at the same time. Another composition from a different era has also been incorporated into this.
The same goes for the interpretation of Vermeer’s famous work. In the close range, everything is toy bricks. But it is at a particular distance that it becomes an interpretation of Vermeer’s classic work. Meaning changes in the close range, and meaning is received at a certain distance, creating a place for artistic activity, here, that is what is being celebrated. In that sense, Ai Weiwei both imitates and questions a classic work simultaneously. He suggests that while the work is classic, deconstructing it and going inward reveals nothing. In Water Lilies, from a certain distance, one can enjoy an abstract experience. It is here that, from a point in art history, one attains the freedom that comes from long-term study and practice of art. He undertakes the dual task of simultaneously reinventing classic works in his own way, which can be called an artistic venture, and astonishing the viewer through its various versions.
This exhibition offers an opportunity to get closer to a legendary artist in the art world. The uniqueness of this exhibition is that it shows what ‘ubiquitous’ means in various materials.
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